I've been dosing sugar, just because I don't regularly have vinegar around. It really tastes terrible in coffee... ;)

I've never really looked, but is there any sort of long term results comparing the three?

I've been using Vinegar and Vodka for several months now with great results. I still get random algae in my frag tank but that is more a result of overfeeding and GFO being depleted. When I change out my GFO algae disappears. I probably should up my dose as my maintenance dose doesn't seem to be cutting it anymore as I'm having to change out 1 cup of GFO every two weeks on a 275 gallon system

I've considered going VSV or even adding Vitamin C to the mix, just haven't been home enough to risk fiddling with things.

I have dosed Vodka, Sugar and Vinegar for quite a while. I discontinued the sugar portion about a year ago as I read somewhere, maybe RC, that it was not good for corals. I am now working on another type filtration that gets rid of PO4, NO3, Dinos, Cyano, Bryospis etc. More later...

yeah there seems to be a fair bit of people who report issues especially with lps and dosing sugar based products exclusively:)

based on this im guessing I should switch to vinegar or maybe both. does anyone know the ratio?

Same ratio as what Brad mentioned, just no sugar.

I wonder if the negative reaction of corals to sugar has anything to do with white sugar now being GMO?

if you go on RC theres a few threads where they have broken down some products to find the ratio , for example nopox was 6: 1 ethanol to acitic acid

Is there a minimum time for a tank to be running before you'd want to start dosing vodka? My tank has been running for about 8 weeks and is still very lightly stocked and only a few coral frags. Should dosing wait until the tank is more established?

I've read that organic carbon sources eventually break down to acetate, which is what the bacteria use (whether it be vodka, sugar, vitamin c etc), so you might as well just dose vinegar. This is possibly also why some other carbon sources can encourage growth of cyano, as n&p reducing bacteria can't take them up immediately but perhaps cyano can.

I think the only real justification I've heard for using vodka, for example, instead of vinegar is volume and ease of dosing. It can be difficult to dose a large enough volume of vinegar at one time without affecting pH, so unless you're using a dosing pump, you need to manually dose multiple times during the day. However, saturating the vinegar with calcium hydroxide eliminates this problem, and gives the added bonus of a small pH boost and some additional elemental supplementation. Win, win, win.

I don't think we want to open that can of worms in this thread...


Good to know :biggrin: