Any good ways to wean a tank off Zeovit?

[Delphinus]

My 280g tank been up and running around 11 months now. It's been a zeovit tank from the get-go.

It's not really working out for me, I don't know what I'm doing wrong but the only thing the zeovit is accomplishing is draining my tank hobby funds and making it so I have less to spend on livestock.

Took a couple phosphate measurements for example, my incoming water change water measures 10ppb, the tank itself measures 30ppb, and my FOWLR (which is just live rock and a skimmer) is 40ppb. That's brutal. The zeovit is barely making a dent into the PO4 readings.

I'm worried quitting zeovit cold turkey will spike the tank. Is there any good way to ramp it down, and get a tank off this system altogether safely?

[Aquattro]

I often forget to dose for a month or so, so I imagine if you just slowly turned the reactor pump back, you'd be fine. Cannot imagine what you're doing wrong though!!

[paddyob]

It's Funny seeing people ditch Zeo.

Everyone swears It's the bomb.

I have seen a few people try stop with detrimental effects. Good luck.

[Delphinus]

To be fair, I've been a zeo user for a few years, and had happier results on smaller tanks. I remember once doing a water change, and compared the incoming freshly-made water to the water coming out of the tank, and the outgoing water had noticeably more clarity to it. That day sold me on the system. Plus seeing some of the very successful tanks running the system, like lobsterboy's or Dez's tanks, .. one can't help but want to try to emulate that. Oh well.

But, for whatever reason, it's not scaling up to the size of tank I have now. I'm at 280g now, before was 75g, and scaling up linearly doesn't seem to be working.

On my last tank which was 110g I tried both zeovit and pellets, and decided to try pellets alone, so just stopped zeovit. This nearly cratered the tank in the end. It was months and months of trying to restabilize it and in the end I don't think it ever really fully recovered before I shut the tank down (when the 280g was ready).

So I have to admit I'm a little concerned about just stopping cold turkey. Having said that, if the PO4 reading is 20-30ppb it might be that it's just not doing anything anyhow and therefore stopping something that is doing nothing, probably isn't going to be very significant in the end. I just don't know. I want to carefully measure my options before pulling the trigger.

Thanks for the thoughts so far, please keep them coming!

[paddyob]

Ask fencer I think he also tried cold turkey sandwiches. Lol.


I was scared from the get go... $$$$$.

[Dez]

Have you tried advise front the zeovit forum? That's how I got my tank dialled in. I posted every week with updates and the zeo guru's dialled it in for me. Since then, I am only doing the basic zee (start,bak, food). I have about 400 gallons of water and I'm only on my second bottle of start. I have just started my 3rd bottle of bak, and only on my second bottle of food. The tank has been running for 2.5 years now. I have stopped all the other dosing like amino acids and oh I can't even remember the names of them. But those were the costly ones even though I was only dosing 10 drops per day. I guess I'm trying to convince you to "hang in there"?