- Hi, guys and girls, I'm ReefMan,
and today I wanted to tell you about Vibrant.
It's a algae solution marketed to cure
sort of everything algae-related in your tank.
Says it brightens and cleans aquariums
in as little as 12 hours.
It's a revolutionary liquid aquarium cleaner.
Say goodbye to algae, cloudy water, et cetera, et cetera.
Everything bad with your aquarium, this can fix supposedly.
I've had problems in my tank with turf algae
or at least what I thought was turf algae.
We haven't been able to definitively identify it.
Took it to a local reef club meeting,
they looked at it with a microscope even,
got some awesome video of it but, best we can tell,
some generic kind of turf algae.
It wasn't responding to vodka.
I dose vodka in my tank.
I don't have any other algae problems.
It's slow growing, pulls off in tufts,
was really not such a big nuisance, but I figured,
hey, heard about this Vibrant stuff,
let's give it a try and see what happened.
So, what I've been doing, Vibrant comes
in just a bottle that has a normal kind
of dripper top on it, you open it up
and squirt out however much you want.
It also comes with a little measuring cup
and in my tank, following directions online,
what I ended up dosing was one milliliter per 10 gallons
of system volume twice a week.
So for my tank, that ends up being about 28 milliliters
twice a week, or every three days is what I did.
That was night and day different between not dosing Vibrant
and after dosing Vibrant, as you can see.
The algae completely started receding.
It wasn't immediate, it took maybe a couple weeks
to really notice it really making a difference,
but I noticed algae was getting darker.
It had some bubbles on it
and just generally receding in the tank.
I also noticed that my nitrate,
which had always been slightly detectable,
is now undetectable, which could be a problem
long term for my acropora, but I haven't noticed
any major problems introduced by Vibrant.
A couple of my acropora frags did start
to recede a little bit around the base,
and this is after most of my algae was gone.
And so now, I've switched to 28 milliliters
once a week instead to try and taper off the Vibrant
a little bit and see what that does to my algae.
I have noticed at that dose rate, the algae
is not disappearing as much and in fact,
some of it looks a little bit more lively
than it did before, so I might end up
taking it back up, just to get rid
of that last little bit, but all in all,
I would say Vibrant has really done
a great job at cleaning up my tank.
Some people do say that it doesn't work for them.
One pattern that I've found, just in reading
threads on Vibrant, was people who used GFO
or RowaPhos or some sort of phosphate remover
found that Vibrant didn't work as well for them.
And when they removed the GFO from their system,
Vibrant started to work almost immediately.
So that could be that the bacteria that's in Vibrant,
maybe it needs some phosphate,
well, I mean, any kind of bacteria
would need phosphate to grow and do its job,
so I would maybe remove anything
like phosphate remover that you have in your tank.
That said, I do dose vodka every day and I have
for a long time, I did not change
that dosing schedule at all, and found
that Vibrant worked just fine with that.
Dosing twice a week with Vibrant, I did notice
my water got a little bit cloudy sometimes,
usually the day after I dosed,
just ever so slightly, and then it would clear up,
so that's something to keep in mind.
Definitely don't overdose your tank.
The recommended dose for turf algae,
which is one milliliter per 10 gallons twice a week,
I think is about the most you're gonna want to do.
People who overdo Vibrant tend to have more problems
with coral or things dying in their tank,
so that's definitely not something you want to do.
There is some question as to what is in Vibrant.
On the back of the bottle it just says
it's 95% cultured bacteria and then 1% aspartic acid,
.5%, half a percent vinegar, and 3.5% other stuff.
So it's probably some kind of bacteria that you're dosing,
so you might be able to get the same thing
from Prodibio or another one of these bacterial sources,
but to that end, I have been dosing the,
oh, and a bacteria that is supposed to get rid
of nitrate and phosphate for you a little bit
and did not notice the same effect that I had with Vibrant.
I haven't had any threads, or have come across any threads
that were looking at Vibrant under a microscope.
I think if you have one, that would be
really interesting to see what's in there.
Are they plant cells?
There's some speculation that this might actually
be a single-celled algae that we're dosing in our tank.
So I'd be really interested to know
if you've looked at it under a microscope,
just to see are they bacteria cells, are they plant cells,
maybe some identifying things that we might
be able to see on a microscopic level in there.
So that was it for this week, I hope you enjoyed.
I do want to say that this video and my tank
and myself personally have no connection to Vibrant.
I bought this myself, I wasn't provided any.
I bought a second bottle because it was working so well.
I just wanted to pass along the information for you.
So let me know if you have any questions.
I'm happy to help you figure out the dosage
for your tank and I will definitely update this
if I find out more about what is in Vibrant.
So see you next week, bye.