Anyone Vodka Dosing???

[phillybean]

Vodka is working for me. 0 Nitrates, 0 phosphates and staying there. Allows me to over feed. Corals look great, water is clear and less film algae.

I dose very little (2 ml/day) and it works great. Ive thought about going full Zeo and I might in the future, but for now, Vodka works

I was doing Vodka + Sugar but got massive Diatoms when I added Sugar.

[pterfloth]

I have been dosing vodka for 3 months now because I shudder at the cost of Zeovit or UltraLith. I never had nitrates over 5 ppm but my phosphates were hard to keep below 0.1 ppm. I slowly increased my Vodka in weekly increments to the present 2.5 ml/day. I never had any bacterial blooms and my nitrates are now unreadable. The phosphates never came down though. In the last week I changed out the Rowaphos in my TLF reactor and the phosphates came down immediately to 0.03 ppm (colorimeter).

I have increased feeding, fish and corals, of my mixed reef tank three-fold, since dosing vodka and plan to keep it up unless conditions change. Everything is growing like mad. SPS frags double or more in size every month, LPS and softies doing great. Very happy with PE and colors.

[Rbacchiega]

pterfloth...can I see some pics of your tank??

[wisesam]

I just starting dosing vodka less than a week ago.
So far not seeing any particularly good or bad.
I'll post my progress as it goes.

[Sebae again]

pterfloth what brand of vodka are you using and how did the amount /time frame develop into the present dosing schedule? Thanks in advance.

[pterfloth]

Here are a couple of shots from my tank. They don't do the tank justice. Wish I had a macro lenses to really show the PE.




I used the guidelines here to gradually increase the dosage:
http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2008-08/nftt/index.php

I got in to the whole vodka thing after I read this http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2008-12/totm/index.php Reef Keeping tank of the month.

Glad to hear from others about their experiences.

[Sebae again]

Your tank looks great!

[fencer]

I was using vodlka dosing at a rate of 10ml / 100 gal over 8hrs. You will get a small bloom of bacteria but if you work the dosing up slowly you can avoid a full scale bacterial overload. I had to stop because of the ultralith field trial. I felt it does work as long as you supplment with other additives. There has been talk about vodlka being feed all types of bacteria in the tank as bad. Not so....even in zeo and ultra systems their food supplement still feeds the other bacteria. I think to have a mono strain of bacteria is very hard to achieve in a reef tank and if you did and found some way of nuking the strain your tank would be toast. Anyways the cost of dosing works out to be as expensive as zeo or ultra additives. In fact the cheapest vodlka I could buy was 20.00 or so. When you add together the other supplements you will find the true cost of dosing. I would consider trying vingear dosing instead if price is a problem. Both zeo and ultra have a lot to offer in the way of a systematic regimen to keeping SPS's healthy