Quote:
Originally Posted by albert_dao
Just to cherry pick a bit, there are two dudes on this board (imisky and emerald_crab) who have cultured Zeobak straight from the bottle, producing several strains based on the carbon source, so....
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Yah I have no doubt that the age and storage conditions of my particular bottle had a lot to do with it. I would very much like to repeat the test with a fresh bottle. I'm not saying that korralen-Zucht is selling a bacterial supplement that has no bacteria in it, I'm saying that I'm not confident that what they're selling remains an active/effective product for long under the majority of usage conditions. Considering how it's stored at the store nearest my house and how long it takes them to turn over their supply... I'd bet that for a whole lot of people they've got nothing but water and some debris from the moment they open the bottle, making it a very expensive way to make yourself feel better about your tank maintenance regiment.
Also, successfully growing a culture of bacteria from a bottle is one thing, saying that dosing those bacteria in whatever quantity is present in each drop (which will be
highly variable from person to person depending on where they bought it/how long they've had it) actually does anything at all in your tank is another. This isn't a problem unique to zeovit though, it's a valid question for all bacterial dosing systems.
I'm not against the zeovit system per se, in fact I'd probably be all over it if I had the patience to dose from droppers every single day. I'm just not convinced that beyond some bare bones base products that work very well to reduce nutrient loads in a tank, there are many products in their line-up that would make the differences claimed on their bottles in a double blind studies. Heck, I'm not even convinced that a lot of their claims are testable in any meaningful way given the vague, wishy washy, 'sounds like a biological statement but is in fact functionally meaningless' way they describe things on their bottles. It obviously works to achieve ULNS, but to do that you need like 3 products (4 if you believe that Zeobak has any value), and their line-up contains dozens which sell at 50 to 60 bucks a pop. I've managed to produce zeovit 'like' results with my tank (pastel colours, no algae growth, great polyp extension, enhanced growth) using biopellets and GFO, at a fraction of the cost of a zeovit system. I also just discovered tonight that my bottle of Pohl's extra is bone dry and likely has been for some time, and I had the dosing settings on my 'coral booster' set to 0 dosings a day (oops. You see why a system that requires daily attention would not be appropriate for me). I've noticed no difference in my coral's colour or growth rates since January, and while I know more than others that one anecdote does not a trend make, it gives me pause.
For what it's worth, I'm sure the people who sell it truly believe in it, so I don't think anyone is lying, and something about the system is clearly working because there are some spectacular zeovit tanks out there. The real question is how much of your money do you need to part with in a zeovit system to actually achieve those results. They would tell you quite a bit, when the reality is probably quite different.