Making dosable food mix

[johnf3]

Hey everyone

I’ve been experimenting the past few months with dosing blends of liquid food into my 20 gallon NPS tank and 40 gallon garden eel/community tank. I’ve been test running it and checking food blends for any weird smells every few days but all seems to be good. I’m using a mini fridge with the doser and foods inside.

The blends consist of 20 ml Tigger Feast and 20ml R.O.E by Reef Nutrition along with 1 tsp ground freeze dried mysis, 1/8 tsp freeze dried rotifers, 1/8 tsp Reef Roids, 1 ml Selcon and 1 ml Polyp Booster by Polyp Lab. I’ve played with ratio of ingredients to help keep everything in suspension and so far so good.

I’m curious if there are any other ways to test how long the food stays good for other than by smell? I am currently changing out the blend every 2 weeks or so and it still smells fine and fish/corals are still going crazy for it. I want to make sure there are no weird food interactions going on though/spoiling rapidly.

Anyone have any second thoughts on this? Or have any experience?
Thanks

 

[Timfish]

Neat idea! I don't feed much liquid or frozen food myself but you might consider what's appropriate for soups left in a refreigerator if no one has a difinitive way of testing. If some of the ingrediants do not have any preservatives in them they might or might not be protected from the ingrediants that have preservatives added. As well, the preserved foods may loose protection if mixed with unpreserved ingrediants.

 

[Naekuh]

Depending on the ambients, food can go bad either really really fast, or take a while.

Can you put the container in something like one of those TEC fridges and drill holes on the side for the tubes?
It could possibly extend the life of the food, if you can control the ambients.

EDIT: I missed the mini fridge....

I would think if you kept the dosing lines really really short, it would not have enough time to go bad if you were dosing proper amount.

Problem tho is if the food does go bad, you would need to replace the lines, as i would not trust cleaning them out.