Little Sugar dosing experiment.

[trilinearmipmap]

I would encourage people to try dosing sugar but start with much lower doses eg. 1/8 teaspoon per 100 gallons and gradually increase the dose, give it 6 or 8 weeks before you judge the results.

I agree with the finding that sugar eliminated cyanobacteria.

[Kryten]

Originally Posted by trilinearmipmap

I would encourage people to try dosing sugar but start with much lower doses eg. 1/8 teaspoon per 100 gallons

And is that every day?

[Farrmanchu]

Everyday, you want to be consistent, so the organisms can always feed off the Carbon. Start low, I found that as I increased the dosage, I ended up with too little Nitrate, my Macroalgae started to shrink. I like my system to have around 5ppm Nitrate, so I stopped dosing. If I get an algae bloom, or Nitrate problems, I'll start again, and slowly ramp up the dosage until I get the results I'm looking for.

[i have crabs]

what about tanks with no skimmer?

[kadaytar]

Dosing sugar works but else than starting from very little amounts there are some other things that you should pay attention. After consuming nitrates and phosphates bacteria dies and establishes a film on the surface. If you remove this film phosphates and nitrates will be removed. To be able achive this you need a good surface skimming and a realy realy good protein skimmer. High bacteria population depletes the oxygen level so a good PS helps you out . Photesynthetic microalgae provides 40-50 % of coral's nutritional need. When you reach zero nitrates and phosphates corals will starve to death if you don't feed them with appropriate food. Also you should take the power outages into consideration. If you don't have a supplemantal solution for power outages oxygen level will go down very fast because of the high bacteria population and your animals will saphocate. If the reason for high nitrates and phostphates is your equipment or system i don't recommend you to dose any types of carbon source including Zeovit. I think Italian Blue coral method is safer than dosing only sugar. Since it is a homemade recipe that contains sugar as well else than reducing nitrates and phosphates it provides a good food source for the corals.

[andresont]

Good point about O2.
yes ! my ORP dropped about 60 points, i just realised that!

[Snappy]

I've have heard of the vodka thing before but I figured after dosing yourself with vodka, just like women at the bar all the tanks look better too.

[michika]

Originally Posted by Snappy

I've have heard of the vodka thing before but I figured after dosing yourself with vodka, just like women at the bar all the tanks look better too.