melev

I've been giving the current reef situation a lot of thought tonight as I'm preparing for my departure, and I believe I may have figured out where the excess bacteria is coming from.

When I dose Prodibio's BioDigest and Bioptim, it requires two Pro vials to match my water volume (or so I thought). I'm using an alternate packaged vials now, which allows you to drip it in. Holding the two vials side by side, they don't match in volume. The front of the boxes has the same information about dosing, but on the back it differs.

BioClean has BioDigest vials and Bioptim vials in the same box. So you have both parts for easy dosing.

Looking at the front, they both say they are for 250g+ systems.

The ink on the glass vials matches as well. "BioDigest Pro 10" is printed on the normal vial as well as the rounder version with the flat end.

But here is where things change. The BioDigest box (on the right) says one for 250g, and my system's liquid volume is 450g so I've been using two. Although as I read it now, it also indicates that it will treat 250g - 2500g, and two vials should be used for 2500g to 5000g. So I've been overdosing both parts for a while now.

Then I used the bigger vial from BioClean, and really overdosed it. It says to use one vial per 500g of liquid volume. Two vials for 500g-1000g. When I make a mistake...

The silver lining is that I won't use up Prodibio nearly as quickly, and I'm relatively certain I've put this situation behind me. As long as the corals can rebound from the past 30-60 days, they should be able to color up once more. And that would make me immensely happy since I see gorgeous corals via pictures daily, and I want mine to be equally vivid.

The water change was performed seven hours ago, and the skimmer has settled in. The reactors are running as they should, including a fresh batch of GAC to help pull out impurities. I have a 7" filtersock running now to capture particulates. Overall things look good. Let's hope everything runs smoothly while I'm at MACNA. I can't do anything else at this point.