Carbon dosing mainteinance dose reference

[Aleph]

Hi guys I'm a week into carbon dosing (vodka), as I was thinking about how to ramp up the dosage in the following days I though, wouldn't it be useful to have a thread about how much users with an established carbon dosing regimen dose in their tanks?

Of course I expect a big variability based on different types of tanks so you could give other info to find common patterns, like:

Type of carbon source (vodka,vinegar,etc...)
Mainteinance dosage per gallon
NO3/PO4 values
Total tank volume
Tank type (BB,DSB, etc...)
Coral population (SPS, LPS etc...)
Light/heavy feeding
Link to your build thread (if you have one)
Other stuff you may find relevant

What do you guys think?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Hi guys I'm a week into carbon dosing (vodka), as I was thinking about how to ramp up the dosage in the following days I though, wouldn't it be useful to have a thread about how much users with an established carbon dosing regimen dose in their tanks?

Of course I expect a big variability based on different types of tanks so you could give other info to find common patterns, like:

Type of carbon source (vodka,vinegar,etc...)
Mainteinance dosage per gallon
NO3/PO4 values
Total tank volume
Tank type (BB,DSB, etc...)
Coral population (SPS, LPS etc...)
Light/heavy feeding
Link to your build thread (if you have one)
Other stuff you may find relevant

What do you guys think?

I tested a very wide range of vinegar doses in my tank and didn’t see any notable visual differences until the dose got super high and the water began to become cloudy.

 

[Dan_P]

Hi guys I'm a week into carbon dosing (vodka), as I was thinking about how to ramp up the dosage in the following days I though, wouldn't it be useful to have a thread about how much users with an established carbon dosing regimen dose in their tanks?

Of course I expect a big variability based on different types of tanks so you could give other info to find common patterns, like:

Type of carbon source (vodka,vinegar,etc...)
Mainteinance dosage per gallon
NO3/PO4 values
Total tank volume
Tank type (BB,DSB, etc...)
Coral population (SPS, LPS etc...)
Light/heavy feeding
Link to your build thread (if you have one)
Other stuff you may find relevant

What do you guys think?

Small chance that there is a useful pattern and an even smaller chance that we will get enough responses to find a pattern if one exists. When you read a decade of carbon dosing posts you will find the following ideas.

Carbon dosing is somewhat like a titration. Keep adding carbon until you hit the endpoint, in this case the desired nitrate level. You can increase the dose more agressively than suggested. As Randy has pointed out, when you add enough carbon, i.e. miss the endpoint, you can make a cloudy and slimey system, though it will likely clear within days of reducing the dose.

The maintenance dose is an idea that only makes sense if you can estimate the amount of excess nitrogen in the system and you know how much carbon is needed for the bacteria in your system to consume just enough nitrogen to keep the desired steady state level of nitrate. This means that the suggested maintenance doses are based on no science. If any of the suggested maintenance doses is wrong, you adjust it up or down to obtain the desired nitrate level. Stopping the carbon dose cold turkey might result in a nitrate spike. Most aquarists ramp down their dose to zero or some smaller amount.

There is a notion that dosing ethanol, but not vinegar, can result in cyanobacteria growth. Cyanobacteria growth may or may not happen with ethanol, so, we might be dealing with a coincidence here. Dosing sugar is risky because some corals are adversely effected by some carbohydrates.

Nitrate reduction with carbon dosing requires phosphate. If the system becomes phosphate starved, nitrate reduction can stop. Phosphate usage by the bacteria does not mean that carbon dosing is an effective phosphate reduction method. It is not.

 

[Aleph]

I agree with all your observations, still there is a point that in my opinion is important and I didn't explain it well enough. Maintenance dose is the rate of carbon we supply to keep organic production and consumpion in equilibrium. We estimate the "degree" of this equilibrium by measuring NO3 and PO4 and keeping them to the desired levels. So I assumed there would be ranges. For example, I found out by reading several threads that the maintenance dose for tanks that maintain low but detectable NO3 and PO4 (like 2 and 0.04) is in most cases between 0.04 and 0.07 ml per gallon of vodka (or other sources equivalent).
So my guess was that maybe there are patterns, they are just modulated by so many parameters that we cannot find them.
Another thing I wanted to explain better is that I don't want to promote dosing to fixed presumed amounts, I want to understand if it's possible to have a reference order of magnitude to avoid ramping too slow/too fast and, most of all, overshooting dosage that is in my opinion the main cause of failure when carbon dosing.