Serious Phosphate Problem

ss30

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Your Po4 has gone up because you have removed the GHA which was consuming the Po4 your No3 is fine.
Your must be or have been feeding to much and your rocks have absorbed Po4 to a point that GHA has started to grow and kept your Po4 at .12, now you have removed the GHA the Po4 it's not being consumed and has spiked to .3.

If you did a 50% water change it would drop your Po4 to .15 but then it would go back up as more Po4 leaches out of your rock.

Ways to try and fix this:-

Carry on as you are keep removing the GHA and increase your lighting period on the refugium some run their light 24/7.

Setup your GFO reactor, GFO can be messy and expensive.

You could keep doing 50% water changes every day or two until your Po4 stop rising and keep removing the GHA(could take weeks even if doing 50% a day).

The only thing I wouldn't do is use Lanthanum Chloride.

You need to sort out why your Po4 is high though.


Good luck.
 

BostonReefer300

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Your Po4 has gone up because you have removed the GHA which was consuming the Po4 your No3 is fine.
Your must be or have been feeding to much and your rocks have absorbed Po4 to a point that GHA has started to grow and kept your Po4 at .12, now you have removed the GHA the Po4 it's not being consumed and has spiked to .3.

If you did a 50% water change it would drop your Po4 to .15 but then it would go back up as more Po4 leaches out of your rock.

Ways to try and fix this:-

Carry on as you are keep removing the GHA and increase your lighting period on the refugium some run their light 24/7.

Setup your GFO reactor, GFO can be messy and expensive.

You could keep doing 50% water changes every day or two until your Po4 stop rising and keep removing the GHA(could take weeks even if doing 50% a day).

The only thing I wouldn't do is use Lanthanum Chloride.

You need to sort out why your Po4 is high though.


Good luck.
Not a criticism, honest question: why not Lanthanum Chloride instead of GFO? I've never used the former and have recently seen a couple other posts where people are hating on GFO and recommending LaCl3 as an alternative. Thx
 

ss30

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Not a criticism, honest question: why not Lanthanum Chloride instead of GFO? I've never used the former and have recently seen a couple other posts where people are hating on GFO and recommending LaCl3 as an alternative. Thx
If you look at the data sheet for Lanthanum Chloride it's "Toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects".
Now I know this I wont use it.
 

ss30

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Just looked and you're right (not that I doubted you, just curious). Hmm. Wonder why it's used in the hobby then? Probably suitable for a whole other thread which I'll start now. Thx!
I'm sure the company's who sell this to the hobby will dispute it though, after all it's a cheap and easy to reduce Po4 in a reef tank(and potentially kill your fish).
 
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ryshark

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Know someone who had a similar issue and did following get down to 0.10ppm PO4 from 0.69ppm:

Light Refugium for 24H
Dose MB7 and NOPOX everyday
Dose iron for chaeto growth
Maintain nitrates > 1

Not saying you need to deploy all of the above but I'm pretty confident this will work without any use of GFO. It is a bit advanced and not recommended to newbies.
On Thursday my PO4 tested .14 then on Friday before going out of town for the weekend I dosed another 25% of the recommended amount of Waste Away, I got home today (Sunday) and my PO4 is now .09, I also tested my Nitrate today and this is now down to 2.5, which I think should be a little higher so I placed an order for NeoNitro tonight, before it bottoms out. I still have algae everywhere, when I turkey baste the algae and the rocks both, it creates tons of "dust." I again scrubbed the rocks to the point where my tank was practically cloudy opaque and couldn't see anything and then added a new mesh filter sock and cleaned the skimmer. I also dosed some more Coral Snow Plus to help the skimmer clean out some of the detritus I stirred up with the turkey baster. I plan to do another 25% dose of waste away in the morning. I'm guessing this will bring my PO4 down to .05 by this coming Wednesday and I sure hope at that point I will see some of the algae start dying and/or stop growing so quickly.
 
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ryshark

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Your Po4 has gone up because you have removed the GHA which was consuming the Po4 your No3 is fine.
Your must be or have been feeding to much and your rocks have absorbed Po4 to a point that GHA has started to grow and kept your Po4 at .12, now you have removed the GHA the Po4 it's not being consumed and has spiked to .3.

If you did a 50% water change it would drop your Po4 to .15 but then it would go back up as more Po4 leaches out of your rock.

Ways to try and fix this:-

Carry on as you are keep removing the GHA and increase your lighting period on the refugium some run their light 24/7.

Setup your GFO reactor, GFO can be messy and expensive.

You could keep doing 50% water changes every day or two until your Po4 stop rising and keep removing the GHA(could take weeks even if doing 50% a day).

The only thing I wouldn't do is use Lanthanum Chloride.

You need to sort out why your Po4 is high though.


Good luck.
I was definitely over feeding at one point and the tank was still looking good with not a spec of algae. You're probably right that my rocks absorbed PO4. However, with all the food I was putting in I was still able to keep the tank around .08 to .12 which is where I was trying to keep it. Then the small spec of algae started even though my PO4 wasn't crazy high and then it snowballed from there. My rocks probably stopped absorbing and started leaching it instead.

I am due for a water change as I skipped the last one since I was doing the Dr. Tims algae recipe, I am at the 2-week mark now since I've done a water change. I plan to do one ASAP. However, my PO4 is down to .09 from the bacteria Waste Away. As I mentioned above I think I'll be down to .05 this week and I sure hope to see signs of improvement.
 
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ryshark

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I think what I am dealing with is actually Lyngbya. My PO4 is down to .06 and NO3 about 3ppm and this "stuff" is still about the same.
 

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