Vinegar in Tank. A lot.

[Emhriverdale]

Sparing the ugly details, I accidently dumped 1 gallon of concentrated 30% cleaning vinegar into the sump of my 75g mixed system early last week. My pH dropped from 8.2 to 7.2 almost immediately. Alk dropped from 10.5 to 8. 

 

I put some air stones in and crossed my fingers (I'm an old ICU nurse, and this brought back memories). I had just done a WC, so I was forced to wait to do 20% WC for 24 hours until the bacterial bloom started. I did another 20% WC the next day. I put filter socks in the sump and have been changing them daily. 

 

pH corrected itself within 12 hours. It's been over a week now. pH/Alk/Calc are normal and stable for 72 hours. Nitrate and phosphate are down to 0. The tank is crystal clean, and livestock happy as ever. 

 

Am I in the clear? I know carbon dosing is a thing, but I can't find reports of someone overdosing to the extent of turning their tank into a (bad math?) 0.4% vinegar solution. Is there another shoe to drop in the process? 

 

Many thanks, and I promise never to do it again. 

[ReefdUp]

Lucky? Not sure what else to say. If it's been a week and all is well, then you may have just gotten super lucky.

[DaJMasta]

I'm sort of surprised the tank only dropped 1 pH with that much vinegar, but I suppose the high buffering capacity probably helps with that.  Was this early in the day, before the bulk of the photoperiod?  Could be that all the photosynthesis helped burn up the extra in short order too.

 

 

It's worth keeping an eye on, but since you saw a bacterial bloom your tank has probably already used up the vinegar, maybe keep an eye out for cyano/dinos in the very low nutrient environment, but I think you've probably dodged the acidic bullet!

[KingOfAll_Tyrants]

Sorry to hear about this mistake!   I hope your tank will be OK, and I can't offer much experience. (though my sense would be that if you're OK after 72 hours in the way you described you're probably OK, granted you should probably let things take their course and not generally otherwise mess with things for another week or two)

 

One question: why do you think you should not want to do a big water change?  I don't mean this to say that I have a reason to say you are wrong, it's just that my instinct if there was some major problem like this would be to do as big a water change as possible ASAP (50, 75, 90% would all be fair to my mind) and I am very interested to being educated as to why doing that might not be best!!!!

[FishingandReefing]

I had done it lol. I was too tired and accidentally dumped almost the amount you as I used the same vinegar bottle for rodi. Anyway, I did maybe one or twice 30% water change, most of the stuffs survived. So don’t panic.


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[jason the filter freak]

@Emhriverdale First, glad you saved it. Congrats! Second, I am absolutely racking my brain, how does this bring back memories of the ICU? 

[Emhriverdale]

Thank you all for the great responses. 

 

@KingOfAll_Tyrants - I had just done a big WC an hour prior, as the tank had been looking 'meh' for a few days. I figured given the volume I administered (back of the napkin estimate was now the DT is a 0.4% vinegar solution), any meaningful rescue would require >50% change. It didn't seem like a small WC would matter, and I didn't have water ready, it was after 10pm, so I told myself 'the tank is already too stressed.' What's the difference between swimming in 0.2% vinegar vs. 0.4% really?!

 

I'm an inexperienced reefer, but my clinical nursing background tunneled my vision to oxygenation. If you have an ICU patient with a low pH and you can't administer sodium bicarbonate or other tricks to raise it, you hyperventilate the patient to blow off CO2 and administer higher % atmospheric oxygen. All of that, of course, if you can't/don't have time to correct the underlying issue. So I did the exact same thing - turned pumps and powerheads to 100, dropped in airstones, and opened the windows. I'm skimmerless at the moment, would have used that as well. 

 

@jason the filter freak - I am completely convinced that ICU nursing and reefkeeping are the exact same thing, and that reefkeeping has major potential to support training and mental health for clinicians. I worked in a intensive care unit for neonatal/pediatric patients. On a normal shift, I would be assigned one patient who is being kept alive through ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation), often post-surgical with a window of cellophane-ish stuff covering their still-opened chest, so I could directly observe and monitor the heart. Here are some of the main things I'd be focusing on. 

 

- Pumps drain blood from the body, pass it through several membranes that oxygenate the blood, and pump it back into the body (overflows and returns).

- Once you have a patient on the ECMO 'circuit,' you can perform most lab draws and medication on the 'pump' side of the system (sump system). 

- I'd drawn dozens of small blood samples to run an arterial blood gas (ABG - ph, 02, bicarb, c02), and make minute changes in the rate of ventilation, % o2, and others to meet my targets (testing and titrating)

- The goal in ICU is stability, not recovery. My kid's vitals might be crap, but they'll be stable crap. No matter how perfectly you do everything, sometimes everything comes crashing down and makes for a few exciting few hours. 

- In such a critical state, kidneys often fail. I'd hook up a dialysis machine to the ECMO circuit, which requires constant titrating of Ca, Mg, K, P, Na and waste export in relation to labs and each others (c'mon, are we not seeing it?!) 

 

This is a pediatric ECMO room (https://www.chop.edu/sites/default/files/ecmo-machine-canonical.jpg). Looks like a cleaner version of my basement. Reefing has been a great outlet for many behaviors/personality quirks that I've locked up since leaving the bedside. 

 

Sorry for the soapbox - but you asked! I am fascinated by the connection here and hope someday to find a way to share reefing with clinicians. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[jason the filter freak]

@Emhriverdale I've been ER/ICU/Trauma for 12ish years. I was thinking you just meant pouring a whole bottle of vinegar in a tank or maybe meant the air stones part and the only parallel was balancing blood gasses at least that's what I came up with later. 

[KingOfAll_Tyrants]

Blech what an awful time for such a mistake to happen!   I think aerating was definitely the right decision, and I really can't blame you for not wanting to immediately do such a big water change!!!!!!!!!!

 

You didn't lose anything?   

Edited September 9, 2021 by KingOfAll_Tyrants

[Emhriverdale]

@jason the filter freak

On 9/7/2021 at 12:34 AM, jason the filter freak said:

@Emhriverdale I've been ER/ICU/Trauma for 12ish years. I was thinking you just meant pouring a whole bottle of vinegar in a tank or maybe meant the air stones part and the only parallel was balancing blood gasses at least that's what I came up with later. 

Cheers to nurses in reefing! I'd have a reefer run my ECMO pump any day!