vibrant liquid aquarium cleaner

xj_matt

xj_matt

Premium member
Ok, so I have been growing around this idea since I built my mee tank. I have a over feeding problum lol...... so what I have been thinking about is using vibrant liquid aquarium cleaner a biweekly to keep things at bay opasit of my water changes , and I say biweekly because I wanna keep some nutrients in my tank as I do not like running a ultra low nutrient tank for my corals.

Do any I've you guys see a problem with doing it biweekly vs ding it weekly as the instructions say to do?

For the guys that have used it what's the pros and cons of this product
 
It sounds like Vibrant works by dosing bacteria which will consume the nutrients, leading to an ultra-low nutrient tank and the bacteria starve themselves out, and you need to re-dose. Does this mean you will have scheduled swings of nutrients from high to low, over and over?...

Have you considered dosing vinegar or vodka but stop short of a full dosing? e.g. start dosing according to the schedule and slowly raise the amount dosed until your NO3 #'s are steady and where you want, then don't change the amount dosed unless your numbers are changing.

I have started dosing vinegar and have tracked NO3 and Phosphates over time as I've slowly ramped up dosing and have watched nitrate levels progressively fall from 20-10 ppm into 2 ppm range, it does seem that I have some control how low the Nitrates go based on how much I dose. I can't say much about Phosphates because my numbers are consistently 0.00 to 0.03 ppm. I don't have a long history of experience with this, but it does seem like it may be a reasonable way to lower nitrate levels without completely eliminating them. By all accounts you can achieve 0 ppm NO3 if you increase dosing volume, I just haven't gone that far yet. I'm trying to target 0-1 ppm NO3 and I'm not worrying about Phosphate because it's already reasonably low.

Back to your original question about success dosing Vibrant with a different schedule - unfortunately don't know. I was just thinking about what I am seeing with vinegar dosing and it might be a way for you to lower nutrients without eliminating them.
 
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I would wait and see what the tank does once cycled . Im feeding three times a day frozen food no rinsing even and haveing nutrient issues zeros across the dam board just dumped a second skimmer cup back into tank and turned skimmer off trying to get the numbers to rise . Such a relaxing hobby lol . Your gonna be running a good size tank your skimmer and if u run a fuge might handle the load just fine on its own. If u do decide to run vibrant be warned theres a reef one and fish only one. I asked whats the difference and all i got was one the fowlr is stronger idk maybe dif strands or less watered down
 
madjoe said:
I would wait and see what the tank does once cycled . Im feeding three times a day frozen food no rinsing even and haveing nutrient issues zeros across the dam board just dumped a second skimmer cup back into tank and turned skimmer off trying to get the numbers to rise . Such a relaxing hobby lol . Your gonna be running a good size tank your skimmer and if u run a fuge might handle the load just fine on its own. If u do decide to run vibrant be warned theres a reef one and fish only one. I asked whats the difference and all i got was one the fowlr is stronger idk maybe dif strands or less watered down
Click to expand...

I'm roughly a 130 gallons of water volume with rock and sand and I have running the reef octopus 150 skimmer I hope that's big enough. The tank has had a Cycle I was at ziro of everything for the last week and a 1/2 .I'm sure all lined up with another mini cycle timeframe seeing the tank has only been up 4 weeks with rock. I juat added my fish last night.
 
Since my 90g system took a back seat to life and my other tanks, it is a heavily overgrown with turf and bubble algae. Anyone that saw my FS post knows what I’m talking about. Anyway, since no one is interested in buying it and since reefing has never been an expense I’ve minded investing time or money into, Ive made the decision to throw good money after bad and bought a 16oz bottle of Vibrant. It was delivered today and I’m intending to dose the maximum 2x weekly amount. Like many, I’m expecting it to be just another bottle of snake oil that doesn’t do anything, but if I can learn anything or help resolve future algae problems on future build id like to experiment on something where I’ve got little to lose and a lot to gain.

Background: 90g system has been up and running a little over 4 years. The light went out in the fuge while I was on a two week vacation and the massive 20g fuge with 10g worth of a variety of macros died and algae completely took over the tank. Being disgusted, I totally neglected the tank and when the skimmer went out I didn’t replace it. The glass was filthy and the rocks and many corals were overtaken with algae. I didn’t replace the bulbs and the tank went over a year without a single water change...

Ok, so I think you probably get the picture.

Anyway a few weeks ago a fellow CR member and I cleaned the mechanicals and actually got the system back going in a positive direction. I’ve seen noticeable growth from some of the montipora corals showing color and PE after nearly a year of what I thought was certainly irreversible death. Fish are happy, LPS are happy and Nems are happy.

Here’s a starting picture for reference:

e3e08c08d2368576444c59e6fca0ee81.jpg


After 6 weeks of 2x weekly dosing Vibrant, weekly water changes, daily skimmer cleaning, reduced feeding, and daily manual removal this is how it turned out:

01c88fa62977e25431810b7b6b9d0bf4.jpg


My conclusion is that Vibrant doesn’t hurt, but certainly isn’t a dose it and forget it product... Rather, it seems to aggressively remove nutrients out of the tank via protein skimming. Paired with other proactive and time consuming tactics (which I actually enjoyed as it got me reengaged with the hobby) it seems possible to turn severely neglected tank around over the corse of several (3) months.

Please feel to let me know if you have any questions about my experience.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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