LNS and ULNS Systems

[stunreefer]

I understand that the carbon source is food however was not sure if the vodka offers a particular benefit over other sources.

It's cheap and you can have some real fun with your reef while dosing I prefer to use a mix of everything honestly regarding different bac sources and carbon sources in order to prevent a monostrain of bacteria, although even people that have run these systems for quite a while haven't really seen this happen, it's more of a theory (monostrain that is).

I have pretty low nutrients right now and testing pretty well yet sill have GHA. It's likely due to the RO only water source. I have since added a DI canister and have noticed improvement but I still have growth, but it's not as strong as it was prior.

If you weren't running a DI canister initially then more than likely something slipped through the RO and has been feeding your algae. As you probably know, if algae is present in a tank it is utilizing nutrients and will cause your test kit to "read low". Keep up with water changes and stay on top of maintaining your RO/DI system and the algae will subside.

I have also read about Zeovit. I don't really want to run a reactor and would like to avoid it if possible. It would require lots of changes to my system (solana 34g AIO) that would be several hundred bucks worth of stuff, so that's the other driving factor in this thinking.

ZEOvit along with Fauna Marin and Brightwell sell zeolite media that can be used either passively or in a reactor, although no zeolites have to be used. Zeolites provide a surface area for the bacteria to live, breed, die, and then be "sloughed" off. It's a more aggressive way of running a bacterial driven system. Zeolites also absorb (small) amounts of ammonia, which is why they must be exchanged occasionally.