Adding supplements, how much, what, when?

So, I purchased this horse with really bad hoofs. He's a quarter horse, so they should be rock hard but they are flaky. He gets a lot of chips and cracks, the bottom has little concavity, healthy frog though. Also, his coat is dull. So, I put him on Mane 10, and a high quality pellet (I do 1/2 and 1/2 mix so he doesn't get a lot of molasses). Other than one week a month of adding Sand Clear (I live in FL), I don't ad any supplements. So recently I bought a biotin supplement, labeled hoof care on the container. My question is, how much do I give him? It says "up to one scoop". Ok..... he gets fed twice a day, so do I ad it at both feedings? Seems a little much.... With the sand clear, I only ad a scoop for his night time feeding. With the biotin I have been adding a scoop at both feedings just because I bought it the other day, and am kinda giving him a kick start on it... but should I bust it down to a scoop per day?
What works for everyone else? What do ya'll ad that has been effective with proven results for hoof care and shiny coats? Other than the standard brush and trim maintenance of course.
Btw, my gelding is a 5 year old dapple gray quarter horse. 15hh.

What's the name of the supplement?
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Not sure if you can get Hoffmans Formula but I really like it.. On another note, I was trimming the farriers trim and had the same issues. I switched to a barefoot trim with bevelled edges and never had any more issues with cracks or chips. Might be an idea for you.

It's called Vita-Biotin Crumbles.

I do a barefoot trim with the Mustang Roll. And sometimes if necessary, I'll take my hoof knife and remove the false hoof underneath, that helps with the concavity, but the chips and cracks are real bad.

What is "Mane 10"? And "a high quality" mixed half and half "so he doesn't get a lot of molasses"?

My apologies but if something has to be mixed 50-50 so the horse doesn't get "a lot of molasses", one of those feeds is not high quality. It's a sweet feed and that may be the problem.

My thought is a complete re-structuring of the diet so the horse has all the required vitamins/minerals without any molasses or grain. One of the best "hoof things" I ever did for all my horses was to put them on Omega-3 Horseshine.

I'm sure the biotin products work wonderfully and are beneficial in severe cases. With the exception of my club hoof horse, who is difficult to keep balanced, the only time my other three have chipped hooves is when they aren't trimmed correctly.

Two of those horses have metabolic issues, one did founder but they both still have strong, non-chipping, non-cracking hooves and the false sole stays put because they need all the help they can get. None of my horses eat grain or grain products and none of them eat anything where the protein source is soy

The hoof flexes, and the false hoof falls off naturally, but I remove it when it's already in the process of falling off.

I mix the grain based sweet feed with the pellet because he is a young horse in training, but too much sugar turns him into a monster. I'm a firm believer in grain based sweet feed, because horses in the wild eat a lot of naturally occurring grain. Plus the protein benefits of pellet, and the growing controversy of "sweet vs. pellet".

Mane 10 is a sweet feed. It's grain based, with almost no pellets, and very little molasses. With me adding pellets, and the quality pasture he get's, free choice of hay in his stall, daily exercises, I expect his condition to vastly improve. However, no hoof no horse. My gelding was very thin when I bought him (800lbs to 1100lbs), and running wild with 8 other horses. He's put a lot of weight on him, but these things take time. His hoofs were already in bad shape (no idea why, since he was wild, you'd think he would have a very nice natural hoof), possibly because of the all grass diet he had available.

Like I said, I'm a firm believer in grains. But my concern is, do I ad the biotin supplement once or twice a day? Horses naturally produce biotin, I presume him to be deficient from his lack of a nutritional diet, and any excess will be secreted in the urine, but the stuff is $14 for 2 lbs and I don't want to be just pissing it away (in literal terms)! Hahaha

I've heard of that Omega-3, and it was one of my considerations, but I always check reviews, and it seemed that the Vita-Biotin was the most recommended next to Farriers Formula. And I really might go for the Farrier's Formula because it's suppose to be the best. A product is only as good as it's results, so I need to see how this supplement proves itself.

ITA with walkinthewalk. Hoof health is more than just biotin (which is just a B vitamin); copper, zinc, iron, etc. are all important to hoof quality as well. The first thing you should look at when you have a problem like poor hoof quality is whether or not you have a solid nutrition plan in place.

Mane 10 doesn't look like a particularly high quality feed. They don't list the NSC (starch & sugar content) but with corn as the 2nd ingredient you can bet it's very high. The oats and molasses don't help either. It also seems very low in the vitamins it lists. For example, it has 4,000 IU per lb of Vitamin A. For my horse, a ~1050 lb 15hh gelding in light to moderate work, the daily recommended intake of Vit A is ~32,000 IU. So, to get enough Vit A, he'd have to eat 8 lbs of Mane 10. I don't know about your horse, but mine would get pretty pudgy from 8 lbs of feed a day. And vitamin A is important- deficiencies leave horses much more prone to fungal infections like rain rot, among other things. Not to mention that even with 8 lbs, my horse would still fall just shy of the RDI for copper.

Not sure what the other pelleted feed you're mixing it with, but there really shouldn't be any need to mix feeds unless you're transitioning from one to the other.

FeedXL.com is a great online resource for determining your horse's nutritional needs. You can enter in the amounts and which brands of feed you're using (it has most feeds already in their database; if you happen to run into one they don't already have, they'll add it for you) and it will show you how that diet is doing as far as fulfilling nutritional requirements.

If you're interested, the people on this forum could probably help you figure out a diet that's good for your horse- though we won't be able to give you as detailed an analysis as FeedXL.

I'd have to disagree with you there- wild horses have very little access to grains. Certainly not anywhere near the concentration of a grain based feed.

And to answer your original question... you'd want to supplement 15-20 mg daily of biotin. Vita-Biotin Crumbles has 6.25 mg per 1 oz serving, so ideally you'd actually give ~3 scoops daily unless he's getting some biotin from another source (Here's an interesting article on biotin supplementation: Biotin Basics: News: Kentucky Equine Research)