VinCaRx? Vinegar Calcium Reactor (1 Viewer)

What are your thoughts about replacing CO2 with vinegar in a calcium reactor.

Let me know below.

my 20lb co2 tank should last me 3 years on a refill. I’m past 15mos and its still quite heavy. I weighed it two months ago and was surprised how little the initial fill weight changed. Doesn’t seem like its worth the headache but it’s always good to see new innovation.

I have never used a CaRX so forgive if this is an ignorant question, but would the effluent also provide a source of carbon dosing if vinegar is used?

Yes

guylaga said:

I have never used a CaRX so forgive if this is an ignorant question, but would the effluent also provide a source of carbon dosing if vinegar is used?

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It’s an interesting concept, but if I remember correctly he isn’t dosing continuously but rather a small amount (3.5mL) every hour which wouldn’t be as stable as a reactor. I could do the same thing with a GHL doser. I wouldn’t get the benefit of carbon dosing, but I never needed to carbon dose anyway.

If they do more testing with recirculation and dose it continuously, that would get me super interested because we can ditch the bulky CO2, CO2 scrubbers, etc. I don’t like having the CO2 in the house, but for now it works just fine.

Reefahholic said:

It’s an interesting concept, but if I remember correctly he isn’t dosing continuously but rather a small amount (3.5mL) every hour which wouldn’t be as stable as a reactor. I could do the same thing with a GHL doser. I wouldn’t get the benefit of carbon dosing, but I never needed to carbon dose anyway.

If they do more testing with recirculation and dose it continuously, that would get me super interested because we can ditch the bulky CO2, CO2 scrubbers, etc. I don’t like having the CO2 in the house, but for now it works just fine.

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And replace the bulky co2 tank with an even larger vinegar tank

Compressed air will take up less space than that vinegar, no doubt. Interesting idea nonetheless though.

Cody said:

And replace the bulky co2 tank with an even larger vinegar tank

Compressed air will take up less space than that vinegar, no doubt. Interesting idea nonetheless though.

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I have a feeling that this will probably not work as well as a regular calcium reactor, because if you don’t have a high nutrient problem (most people don’t now because of the technology we have today) it will be tricky to manage.

If you’re not dripping every second, you can’t really call it a calcium reactor. For me it would be more like a dosing reactor.

I was dosing 150x a day and as soon as I hooked that reactor up I saw things that started to take off that were only sitting before. So if it’s not continuously dosing, it’s not gonna outperform CO2 even if the pH is higher.

This is a nice idea, but how is it different from using calcium acetate to dose calcium?

GMay said:

This is a nice idea, but how is it different from using calcium acetate to dose calcium?

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I personally like a calcium reactor, because it is by far superior to a dosing pump because of the stability. I would know because I used a dosing pump alone for years to avoid a large reactor in my living room with a bulky 20# CO2 bottle. A dosing pump works well, but you will likely wait longer for growth unless you’re a next level Reefer and there are some guys out there that have things so dialed in that they can easily outgrow the guy with the reactor, because they know how to balance and supplement all the elements needed for growth. If you took that same skilled guy and had him set up two tanks…one tank with a reactor and the other tank on a pump…the reactor tank would outgrow the tank on the pump. It’s not that the pump doesn't work, because they do and they work very well. It’s just simply not as stable and most 2-parts don’t add back enough elements. A reactor will add back more elements that are in the media that 2-parts don’t have unless you add minor and trace elements with it.

Most forms of supplementation work, but the calcium reactor is proven to grow massive colonies faster given enough time and if the reefer knows how to balance the aquarium.

For example:
There are 86,400 seconds in one day. A calcium reactor can easily dose at this continuous rate.

The GHL dosing pump I was using before I switched to a GEO reactor was dosing 150X a day. That is 576X “less stable” (if you will) than a reactor which is why I saw corals take off after they had been sitting there prior. When corals have exactly what they need at literally every second and the tank is balanced, let’s just say they do well.

Make sense?

How do you dose the Calcium Acetate?

TX_Punisher said:

my 20lb co2 tank should last me 3 years on a refill. I’m past 15mos and its still quite heavy. I weighed it two months ago and was surprised how little the initial fill weight changed. Doesn’t seem like its worth the headache but it’s always good to see new innovation.

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Yeah stick to the original method.

That's a lot of vinegar pumping through the system to melt the stones and dumping in the tank daily. Next thing you know all the stones turned into mush. Interesting topic but definitely needs more research.