Did I unlock all the phosphate from 100#s of live rock?

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Daddy-o

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I found this online:
As with calcium hydroxide, the effectiveness of lanthanum is greater the higher the phosphate concentration in the water, which means that lanthanum is particularly suitable for reducing a very high phosphate concentration, and less useful for lowering a slightly raised concentration to an ideal level or keeping it low via long-term application. That appears to remain the province of established phosphate adsorbers.
 
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So after reading that LC is not really a good choice when we get to lower levels, I am going to stop dosing LC and start up the reactor. I am gonna use up some of the PhosGuard I still have. I have a small BRS reactor and filled it up to the top. I open up the reactor and rinse the Phosguard to get all the crud out after 2 days and replace the medium every 4 days. Gonna run til xmas and do a phosphate test.
Cheers! Mark
 

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So after reading that LC is not really a good choice when we get to lower levels, I am going to stop dosing LC and start up the reactor. I am gonna use up some of the PhosGuard I still have. I have a small BRS reactor and filled it up to the top. I open up the reactor and rinse the Phosguard to get all the crud out after 2 days and replace the medium every 4 days. Gonna run til xmas and do a phosphate test.
Cheers! Mark
It might be interesting if you’re willing to do weekly tests in that time. This way we might see if/when the media exhausts.
 

Randy Holmes-Farley

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So after reading that LC is not really a good choice when we get to lower levels, I am going to stop dosing LC and start up the reactor. I am gonna use up some of the PhosGuard I still have. I have a small BRS reactor and filled it up to the top. I open up the reactor and rinse the Phosguard to get all the crud out after 2 days and replace the medium every 4 days. Gonna run til xmas and do a phosphate test.
Cheers! Mark

While I personally think GFO is a better option than either lanthanum or aluminum oxide (Phosguard), I do not think that there is any special problem using lanthanum to keep phosphate at acceptable levels for a reef and that it is only suited to dealing with very high levels. All of these methods have pros and cons.
 
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While I personally think GFO is a better option than either lanthanum or aluminum oxide (Phosguard), I do not think that there is any special problem using lanthanum to keep phosphate at acceptable levels for a reef and that it is only suited to dealing with very high levels. All of these methods have pros and cons.
I do have a jug of GFO that will be next on the menu
 
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It might be interesting if you’re willing to do weekly tests in that time. This way we might see if/when the media exhausts.
While I am happy to do testing, I dont understand how a weekly test would give insight to when the medium exhausted?
 

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While I am happy to do testing, I dont understand how a weekly test would give insight to when the medium exhausted?
If you see the phosphate level slowly trending down then a discontinuity where it suddenly starts trending up, in the presence of no other changes I would interpret that as exhausted media. Beyond that I’m not sure what it will tell us, but we won’t know without the data.
 

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I found this online:
As with calcium hydroxide, the effectiveness of lanthanum is greater the higher the phosphate concentration in the water, which means that lanthanum is particularly suitable for reducing a very high phosphate concentration, and less useful for lowering a slightly raised concentration to an ideal level or keeping it low via long-term application. That appears to remain the province of established phosphate adsorbers.
I tested today after 24 hours of not dosing and it increased to .66ppm from .24ppm yesterday. So I think my rocks are still leaching. I will skip another day and test it again tomorrow.
 
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Seems like the reefing community is sorta split on whether aminos and feeding the corals really has a huge impact on SPS. I have been adding them every night on a 3 day rotating schedule:
Day 1 - 12ml of Oyster Feast
Day 2 - 12 ml of RedSea A/B
Day 3 - 12 ml of Me Polyp Extender (Aspartic acid - amino)
I have a lot of fish and would rather feed the fish more than add "liquid" food at night. So I am going to stop feeding Oyster Feast (really pricey anyway imho.) This will be replaced with cod eggs for the time being. And I think that I am going to start skipping a day in between the nightly feedings. So:
Day 1 - feed
Day 2 - skip
Day 3 - feed
Day 4 - skip
Day 5 - feed
Day 6 - skip
This should help get my phosphate even lower but I will have to more closely monitor my nitrate because it is at 7 and I dont want it much lower. If the nitrate dips, I have 3 options. Remove 1 of the 3 skimmers, cut down on carbon dosing, or increase the amount of food that I feed the fish. I guess I could also add more fish but I already have 50ish fish.
Cheers! Mark
 

excell007

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Looks like we are measuring bound phosphate. I replace all my socks and the measured phosphate decreased without dosing LC for 3 days. Replaced my main drain sock (7") from 100 to 10 micron and the skimmer output sock from 10 to 5 micron. I started dosing again last night and see how it goes with the 5 micron sock.
 

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i don't think it does, I just dose it before the sock to hopefully catch most of the lanthanum phosphate.
 
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Just a quick update:
My levels are at .03-.04 - finally!! I have been testing every couple days. Currently I am running the reactor with Phosguard (a small BRS reactor, changing medium every 4th day) and dosing a small amount of Phosphat E (dripping 2ml daily). I am so happy, I have been trying for a couple years to get my levels down and I am finally there.
Cheers! Mark
 

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You might think about stopping all phosphate removal for a week or so, then test. See how much they've changed. Unless you've already done this. You don't want to bottom them out.
 
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Next question, has it made any difference?
I think so. The reef looks a lot cleaner. There is definitely less algae growing in the system and I can see the corals growing more than they ever have.
 

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I am also at .07-.09, but still dosing a little. The rocks are still leaching a little bit, if i skip dosing it goes up to .12-.15. This is a lot better than 3 weeks ago when it can go up to .66 if I skip. After 3 months and about a liter of phosphate-e I did manage to lower it from >4 to less than .1, dosing to remove .75ppm daily. Theoretically 1 litter of phosphate-e should remove approximately 40ppm of phosphate in my system, so that's how much phosphate is stored on my >100# of 15YO live rocks and sand. I am still doing the dose for 2 days and skip 1 day routine to guage how much the rocks are still leaching but it doesn't look as bad anymore.
 
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