High phosphate dilemma - help needed

[BryanM]

My experience has not been that using GFO likely leads to dinos.... that is just my experience though, and I've used a lot of it over the last year.

I've also used Lanthanum in to a filter sock to try and mitigate tang risk, never lost a tang, but I found using LC to be finicky.

 

[Idech]

I think the easiest way is to just dose silicate while using a binder, but growing macroalgae or an ATS will use little to no silicate.

I’m not dosing silicates anymore but I have a diatom bloom that I need to keep. I had a refugium full of chaeto but it is slowly dying because of the vodka dosing. There won’t be anything left of it soon.

I have no room for any algae turf scrubber.

 

[Idech]

My experience has not been that using GFO likely leads to dinos.... that is just my experience though, and I've used a lot of it over the last year.

I've also used Lanthanum in to a filter sock to try and mitigate tang risk, never lost a tang, but I found using LC to be finicky.

I’m sure it doesn’t for most tanks but in my case removing the silicate and diatoms will leave room in the ecosystem for Dino’s to come back. They were prevalent in my tank for 5 years so very, very stubborn.

 

[BryanM]

I’m sure it doesn’t for most tanks but in my case removing the silicate and diatoms will leave room in the ecosystem for Dino’s to come back. They were prevalent in my tank for 5 years so very, very stubborn.

In that case I'm sure I'd opt to dose silicates, or choose another method to lower phos.

I'm a big proponent of algae turf scrubbers.

 

[Dogeatbird]

I am curious what the forum’s thoughts are about this:

Continue your daily water change but reduce the volume to 1l/day.
Keep the waste water.

In the waste water start a culture of phytoplankton.

Dose back the cultured phytoplankton.

Ultimately trying to sequester your PO4 in phytoplankton.

Does not really remove from system, rather fixed into a potential food source for micro fauna and other organisms within your system.

Choices for adjusting high nutrient are really three paths.

1: Mechanical/chemical binding.

GFO / Aluminum Oxide / Lanthanum chloride (LaCl₃)

2: Sequester through a macro or micro algae.

3: more aggressive water changes.

Option 1, the OP seems adverse to because of livestock/ rapid changes/ repeat of potential Dinos.

2:i Involves either bringing on auxiliary/ alternative filtration. Also does not really remove the nutrients; merely makes it temporary unavailable.

Larger or more aggressive water changes; also seem adverse to the OP desire for a gradual decrease.

 

[Pistondog]

I am curious what the forum’s thoughts are about this:

Continue your daily water change but reduce the volume to 1l/day.
Keep the waste water.

In the waste water start a culture of phytoplankton.

Dose back the cultured phytoplankton.

Ultimately trying to sequester your PO4 in phytoplankton.

Does not really remove from system, rather fixed into a potential food source for micro fauna and other organisms within your system.

Choices for adjusting high nutrient are really three paths.

1: Mechanical/chemical binding.

GFO / Aluminum Oxide / Lanthanum chloride (LaCl₃)

2: Sequester through a macro or micro algae.

3: more aggressive water changes.

Option 1, the OP seems adverse to because of livestock/ rapid changes/ repeat of potential Dinos.

2:i Involves either bringing on auxiliary/ alternative filtration. Also does not really remove the nutrients; merely makes it temporary unavailable.

Larger or more aggressive water changes; also seem adverse to the OP desire for a gradual decrease.

Phyto cultures are tricky enough with fresh salt water. Using tank water would likely result in spoiled batches.

 

[Dogeatbird]

Phyto cultures are tricky enough with fresh salt water. Using tank water would likely result in spoiled batches.

Green water; has been used for decades by hobbyists, both
Fresh and Salty.

It is an alternative, not a lab based mono culture.

Sometimes we all forget about the OP statement and goals.

Instead we assume that the keyboards justify snide responses.

 

[Dogeatbird]

Mechanical means; filter socks / fleece rollers / skimmers. Export when the sock is cleaned, fresh roller mat exposed, skimmer cup emptied.

Chemical means: when media is replaced refreshed.

Biological; when algae growth is likewise removed.

Carbon dosing / Bacteria farming; temporarily binds N and P in a biomasss. Only to be released when that biomass is decomposed or consumed by other organisms.

Green water / indiscriminate phyto plankton growth also is only a layover in the N/P cycle.

 

[slingfox]

You have plenty of options to reduce phosphates. For in-tank, you could use LC. There are relatively safe ways to do this but as noted above, you could put the yellow tang in a QT tank for a few weeks as you dose. GFO is a Tiger option. Dose silicates if you are worried about silica level.

You could also remove the rock work and treat in bins with LC and then GFO. I did this with live rock from a tank breakdown recently. Worked very well. Phosphate level in the bins from the rock was off the scale from the Hanna checker. I dosed a bunch of LC, then carbon the Curpisorb bet several days. I’d didn’t run GFO since I don’t use it but that could have been a final step to reduce phosphates to near zero.

 

[Dogeatbird]

Any procedure or method has up and down sides.

LC and GFO produce a precipitate; thus isolating the P.

Ultimately the precipitate needs to be exported to remove the P from the system.

LC also lowers the oxygen content temporarily, and the precipitate can be an irritant to gills and other organs.

Treatment of rock in a separate bin, moves the precipitate into that bin. Also precipitation cascades onto the rock, and pores within the rock.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I am curious what the forum’s thoughts are about this:

Continue your daily water change but reduce the volume to 1l/day.
Keep the waste water.

In the waste water start a culture of phytoplankton.

Dose back the cultured phytoplankton.

Ultimately trying to sequester your PO4 in phytoplankton.

Does not really remove from system, rather fixed into a potential food source for micro fauna and other organisms within your system.

Choices for adjusting high nutrient are really three paths.

1: Mechanical/chemical binding.

GFO / Aluminum Oxide / Lanthanum chloride (LaCl₃)

2: Sequester through a macro or micro algae.

3: more aggressive water changes.

Option 1, the OP seems adverse to because of livestock/ rapid changes/ repeat of potential Dinos.

2:i Involves either bringing on auxiliary/ alternative filtration. Also does not really remove the nutrients; merely makes it temporary unavailable.

Larger or more aggressive water changes; also seem adverse to the OP desire for a gradual decrease.

Water change’s are generally not effective for phosphate reduction unless the tank is very small. A 50% change will result in much less than a 50% drop due to release from rock and sand.

All other methods can be as slow as you want to go. The idea that one might overshoot assumes one uses too much.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

LC also lowers the oxygen content temporarily, and the precipitate can be an irritant to gills and other organs.

That is not accurate. There is no mechanism whereby lanthanum actually lowers O2.

 

[Dogeatbird]

Directly, no lanthanum chloride does not react with O2.

Indirectly, there are a couple of mechanisms by which O2 is affected.

1: clogged gills.

2: Algae die off.

3: increase in solids suspended in water column also can temporarily limit the O2 - water surface exchange.

 

[mulsky]

In my experience LC binds SiO3.
I use a Lanthanum reactor. It almost completely lost its effectiveness when I added silicate, and the phosphate level rose from 0.2 to 0.5 within a month. I then had to stop dosing silicate to keep the phosphate level within reasonable limits. I'm sure it wasn't an error caused by interference between the phosphate test and the silicate, as I have another tank with phosphate level near zero, and adding silicate didn't increase the phosphate test reading.

 

[fish_collector]

This is it about 14 months ago, because I fought Dino’s and lost most of my corals.

Your tank is wonderful why do you feel the need to reduce the phosphate? Understood this photo is older, what does it look like today?

There's always more than one way to skin a cat...everyone always mentions silicates, LC and GFO, I feel I'm a relatively successful reef aquarist and I have none of those items in my inventory of stuff. The phosphate level in my sps system is very high (according to everyone on this forum at least) but since the corals grow good, have good polyp extension and color I've never felt the need to try and get it down. Fwiw, it was .43 a month ago when I tested it last and certainly higher now. I will say that I had a lot more coral issues when it was much lower, trying to fight it and keep it at 0.08 was difficult and resulted in big swings and a lot of packets of reagent. I finally got fed up and decided to let it go and see how high was too high, my corals have never looked better

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Directly, no lanthanum chloride does not react with O2.

Indirectly, there are a couple of mechanisms by which O2 is affected.

1: clogged gills.

2: Algae die off.

3: increase in solids suspended in water column also can temporarily limit the O2 - water surface exchange.

Ok, I don't agree, but in any case, folks should not be misled that lanthanum dosing directly decreases O2.

1. I don’t know if clogged gills is a real thing, but whether real or not, it is not an effect on O2 on the water.

2. Algae may or may not die, butmost often that is not an effect of typical lanthanum dosing.

3. I do not believe 3 is a real effect. Only something coating the air/water interface will reduce gas exchange. Suspended solids do not change O2.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

In my experience LC binds SiO3.
I use a Lanthanum reactor. It almost completely lost its effectiveness when I added silicate, and the phosphate level rose from 0.2 to 0.5 within a month. I then had to stop dosing silicate to keep the phosphate level within reasonable limits. I'm sure it wasn't an error caused by interference between the phosphate test and the silicate, as I have another tank with phosphate level near zero, and adding silicate didn't increase the phosphate test reading.

That’s a good point. Lanthanum silicate has quite low solubility.