Carbon dosing side effect... Dinoflagellates

Hello all. I've been experimenting with carbon dosing for the better part of a year. I've used vodka and vinegar. I find that it does what it's supposed to do but with an interesting side effect. After the second or third week of dosing I get hit with dinoflagellates.

My first foray into carbon dosing i noticed the Dino which I initially thought was red slime. So I went through the usual remedies of red slime and continued vodka dosing. The Dino only got worse. When I finally realized I had Dino and not red slime i stopped dosing vodka and did the usual steps to beat the Dino. It took me over two months to beat it. I raised my PH, raised my magnesium, fed less and did no water changes and did a series of 3 day total blackouts. All of which only weakened the Dino but did not eradicate it. What finally did it was Fauna Marin Ultra Algea X.

After months with no Dino I decided to try the carbon dosing again. This time with Vinegar. After about 5 days of dosing I noticed the first signs of Dino again. So I immediately stopped. Dosed with ultra algea x again to kill it off quickly.

Anybody else have this experience? I want to purchase a bio pellet system but I don't want to run into Dino issues. They are the STD of our hobby.

 

From what I've read liquid carbon dosing will feed all bacteria including Dino and cyano. Using pellets works differently. Look up Dr. Tim biopearls. I've never had an issue with nuisance algae or dino/cyano with his pellets. Really good product

 

I ran pellets a while back with BRS's pellets and Warner's. I did not experience a dino outbreak as a result.

 

I think you both possibly don't have it (Dino) introduced in your system. I may have inadvertently introduced it into my system by purchasing a frag from a LFS that had a Dino outbreak. Therefore it's in my system at low levels until I feed it with any sort of carbon

 

Yeah, I would try the pellets. or.. check out prodibio. Use the digest only until dino is gone then start the biotim.
Also from what I've read vinegar vs. vodka... the vodka users get cyano much more often so they shifted to vinegar or a vsv method.