ZEOstart 3
Dosing: 1-2 ml/1000 liters/daily
Storage: ambient temperature, 1 month if diluted
Zeostart represents the main organic carbon source of the zeovit system, in order to understand the dynamics of this foundamental product we need to briefly explain the concept of carbon source. We know that bacteria, as all the other animals, need to get from their habitat energy and simple compounds, required for the synthesis of complex molecules. B
asic elements are nitrogen, oxigen, phosphorus and carbon, that are the fundamental components of biological organic molecules: nucleic acids, amino-acids, carbohydrates, lipids.
Bacteria can easily get nitrogen and phosphorus from the pool of phosphates and nitrogen compounds in the water of our tanks, this is exactly the assumption on which zeovit is based and also all the other methods: using bacteria to remove undesired compounds.
Oxygen is obtained from various compounds, but here we don’t need to analyze this aspect.
We arrived now to carbon, some species can get it directly from carbon dioxide but most bacteria get carbon from other molecules, such as acetic acid, ethanol, glucose.
Now it shoud be clear that phosphorus, nitrogen and oxygen are easy to get and don’t represent a limiting factor, while carbon compounds are scarce and therefore limiting. Dosing carbon sources we ensure bacteria the only element they need for reproducing and keeping on absorbing phosphorus and nitrogen.
The logical consequence is that we can modulate the removal of waste compounds just varying carbon quantity we dose in our tank.
We saw that exist several molecules and several methods we can use for providing carbon to bacterial colonies and the various methods usually differ only from the compound they use. Zeovit uses acetic acid but ethanol and glucose are equally effective.
Zeostart contains acetic acid with the addition of nutrients and useful compounds for bacterial metabolism, this product is extremely concentrated, 1 or 2 ml are enough for 1000 liters. Often we need to dilute it in order to use automatic dosing systems, which minimal dosing quantity is 1 ml. The dilution should be done with bi-distilled high-purity water, this preparation has a limited lifespan of about 1 month, since it is highly prone to bacterial contamination.
I close this brief article with a consideration that is often ignored or underestimated by many aquarists: in view of his capacity of stimulating bacterial reproduction, zeostart should be dosed 4 or more hours after zeobak. A contemporary dosing of the products can easily bring to an uncontrollable bacterial explosion.