PE decreasing a ton after 6 hours?

[Big E]

Thank you! I will definitely take it slow, I did not think in my 250g of actual water the 1 cup of GFO would take down phosphate that much, I guess I was clearly wrong.

I am getting KCL from amazon delivered today, so I will be dosing that to get my potassium up to 400. Any recommendations from anyone on how much I can raise my potassium level in a day? I do not want to go too fast.

I use 4-5 ounces of GFO for a 90 gallon system, so maybe try going off of that for your system. It's also based off on how much food I feed.

Randy has an article on Potassium........I would dig that up or even ask him in the chemical forum. I doubt it would be harmful to get it back up to 400 over a week's time.

That’s why I avoid chemical filtration. GFO and such are band-aids, which in the short term can help but in the long term lead to instability IMO.

GFO is not any more of a band aid then any other filter component. When it exhausts, algae will take up the excess short term so your PO4 level won't change. Once you know how long it lasts, it's easy to time out when to change it out for steady state.

A lot depends on how it's used as well. I use it 24/7 on my display but I also only use a skimmer.........no algae filter or carbon dosing is used on my set up.

 

[CoralWealth]

I use 4-5 ounces of GFO for a 90 gallon system, so maybe try going off of that for your system. It's also based off on how much food I feed.

Randy has an article on Potassium........I would dig that up or even ask him in the chemical forum. I doubt it would be harmful to get it back up to 400 over a week's time.



GFO is not any more of a band aid then any other filter component. When it exhausts, algae will take up the excess short term so your PO4 level won't change. Once you know how long it lasts, it's easy to time out when to change it out for steady state.

A lot depends on how it's used as well. I use it 24/7 on my display but I also only use a skimmer.........no algae filter or carbon dosing is used on my set up.

awesome thank you and I will look up his article. I did post in one of the potassium threads over there but I will do more research since I am getting the KCL today

 

[jda]

GFO can easily lower the concentration in the water column. It is the "reservoir" in the aragonite that holds a ton.

I did an experiment once and over 55 ppm of P in a 10g tank bound down to about .16 with just about 20 hunks of ARM large media in a reactor. That is a lot. Dr. Holmes-Farley had some nice studies that showed that aragonite binds exponentially with high tank water readings. All absorption and release was completed in about 24 hours. GFO could lower the water concentration to media exhaustion in about 30 minutes if I ran it through fast enough... then it took 24 hours to come back up with the aragonite release. These are the types of spikes that I would avoid.

Did the Purge treatment work? Some of the locals were incredibly disappointed with it and went with the long term KZ treatment instead.

 

[CoralWealth]

GFO can easily lower the concentration in the water column. It is the "reservoir" in the aragonite that holds a ton.

I did an experiment once and over 55 ppm of P in a 10g tank bound down to about .16 with just about 20 hunks of ARM large media in a reactor. That is a lot. Dr. Holmes-Farley had some nice studies that showed that aragonite binds exponentially with high tank water readings. All absorption and release was completed in about 24 hours. GFO could lower the water concentration to media exhaustion in about 30 minutes if I ran it through fast enough... then it took 24 hours to come back up with the aragonite release. These are the types of spikes that I would avoid.

Did the Purge treatment work? Some of the locals were incredibly disappointed with it and went with the long term KZ treatment instead.

Okay makes some sense. I also bought some Phosphate RX that I am going to keep on hand and may do a small 1 drop every other day or something long term instead of running GFO all the time, but we will see.

Yes purge did work for me but I also had a very very small population but it definitely worked for me and I would recommend it to anyone who asked me. Maybe I had the easy to kill AEFW, seems there are a couple different strands (or at least that is what UWC is saying)

 

[jda]

I don't trust UWC as far as I can throw them, but I do trust smart hobbyists. Thanks for the opinion.

For a quick swag on stuff, you can use a Salifert Phophate test kit. All that you need for it is "clear" or "not" so in situations where you are measuring the output from the GFO reactor, you can save a Hannah test and just use the cheaper Salifert... if it is clear, then exhausted. If not, then good to go.

 

[CoralWealth]

I don't trust UWC as far as I can throw them, but I do trust smart hobbyists. Thanks for the opinion.

For a quick swag on stuff, you can use a Salifert Phophate test kit. All that you need for it is "clear" or "not" so in situations where you are measuring the output from the GFO reactor, you can save a Hannah test and just use the cheaper Salifert... if it is clear, then exhausted. If not, then good to go.

Believe me, I was really nervous to use Purge but of course the AEFW were on my colonies that there was no way I could remove and I figured I would give it a shot and if my corals declined, I was going to do water changes right away but it really worked for me. Definitely messed up my phosphates though haha.

Perfect, I will have to stop by the LFS and get that salifert phosphate test kit

 

[Makers Marc]

BTW - I think that if you had LEDs over your tank, you would have had some STN, RTN or burn from all of these swings. Instead, your stuff is doing well still... not as well, but still healthy. I have no way to prove this, but you don't see as many salinity/po4/potassium/alk swing survival posts with LED lit tanks.

I never have read a poster hate on LEDs more than you haha. Literally, a post could be about algae or sponges in the sump, but you always find a way to circle back to hating on them [emoji23][emoji23]

I don't care that you do. Just making an observation after reading r2r daily. Its like LEDs burned your nuts when tanning or something [emoji1787][emoji1787]