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Phosban Reactors/Phosban

G

gettankedaquariums

I have some comments and some suggestions and it's not to offend anyone here on this forum.

I see that a lot of hobbyist spending good money, time and energy on expensive phosphate & nitrate removal products that only treat the symptom(s) of the problem and not the source(s) of the problem.

By determining and eliminating the phosphate & nitrate source(s), you will save yourself a lot of money spent on expensive phosphate & nitrate removal products.

It can be a long and tedious process to determine the phosphate & nitrate source(s).

My philosophy for filtration and maintenance is to keep it plain and simple and user friendly.

If the following makes any rhyme or rhythm too you, please try and incorporate into your system, if possible, or just enjoy the post.

I monitor my R/O DI water, run phosphate free carbon in a media reactor, use 25 micron filter bags, use Kalkwasser in my top off water, test ph/alkalinity/calcium weekly and adjust, test Magnesium, Borate, Strontium and Iodide every 3 to 4 weeks more or less and adjust if needed, minimum 10% water change weekly, IMO they really are essential, think of the water change as a supplement pill, a good salt mix has what you can not get from a bottle.

I truly believe that protein skimmers are an essential part of the filtering process.

I did use 13 – 6’ tall x 4” diameter DIY counter current protein skimmers on my 3,000 system and now I’m 100% skimmer-less, I replaced the skimmers with my 2 year old mangrove plants that I started out as seedlings.

If YOU HAVE THE TIME, go to your grocery store frozen seafood department and buy anything that came out of the oceans and is not seasoned, steam, chop and feed it to your tank (try the scallops first) I also take dried purple seaweed and re-hydrate it (saltwater only) and use the purple juice from the seaweed and add it to the meaty foods before freezing and of course feed the seaweed to the fish.

By applying the above, I personally have not had any phosphate & nitrate problems in or about 20 years or more plus or minus.

If you would like me to elaborate further on any subject, let me know, again the above is what works for me and may or may not work for you?

Good Luck!
gettankedaquariums / Garry
 
C

Carlo

I'm going to disagree with you Gary in a nice friendly way on a couple things. :)

Using RO/DI water is a good start but even water at 0 TDS can have significant phosphates in it. Phosphates don't really test on a TDS meter. They aren't like calcium and magnesium minerals. This is one of my pet peeves with RO/DI units people buy cheap. Without the right filters they sometimes don't do much for phosphates. You can have 0 or 1 TDS and think your water is great but that just means it's super low in minerals and metals for the most part. Granted you can and should test your RO/DI water and will know if this is something you should address filter wise. Once addressed, if needed, your good to go with clean phosphate free water. So I agree with you on the use of RO/DI water.

Just about any carbon you use will leach phosphates into the water. There are very few that don't to any noticeable extent but they are super expensive on a per once basis. Just about any carbon will leach phosphates, especially anything made from coal. It's just the way it is. It's derived from something organic and it will have phosphates in it. There are certain processes in manufacturing that can help keep the leaching in check but almost all common store brands of carbon leach. Some much more then others. The less water volume the person has the more noticeable the problem is. The more water volume the less the issue tends to be. The gallonage masks the problem so to speak.

Here's my main disagreement from the standpoint of this thread. Feeding fresh or frozen grocery store sea foods is one of the worst things you can do from a phosphate standpoint. Processed foods are usually much, much lower in phosphates then fresh foods and are usually enriched. This is purely from a phosphate standpoint. There are many good reason for feeding fresh foods (as long as no preservatives are used) including the amino acids, fats, proteins, natural vitamins, etc...

I doubt you would see problems from using these foods and carbons with the use of that many skimmers or from the use of mangroves. The skimmers should have pulled enough out of the water that it wouldn't break down. The mangroves will uptake a lot of the nitrates and phosphates. You also have pure water volume working on your side. I'm sort of the same way on my system. I can feed as much of anything I want because I also have the bio & chemical filtration to back it all up. I can literally dump a bottle of DT's phytoplankton directly into my tank with no measurable rise in nitrates or phosphates. Doing this on a 100 gallons system would cause lots of grief. :) Unfortunately this doesn't scale down that well to smaller tanks and they tend to have phosphate issues, some nitrate issues also.

So basically I agree with you except the fresh/frozen grocery store foods (phosphate wise) when you take into consideration the differences in water volumes.

Carlo
 
B

Boomer

I TOTALLY disagree. The test isn't supposed to be "real world". It's supposed to be isolated and without outside interference

Well, it most certainly should be and may will TOTALLY diagree with you. Lab test can give different results than the real world and has been proven many times. And tanks are the real world and can produce different results. Lab tests are only a guide. All one has to do is look at the drug world of pharmaceutical.

Newsalt

Yes you need to run anthoer test as suggested by Phyl.
 
C

Carlo

Boomer said:
I TOTALLY disagree. The test isn't supposed to be "real world". It's supposed to be isolated and without outside interference

Well, it most certainly should be and may will TOTALLY diagree with you. Lab test can give different results than the real world and has been proven many times. And tanks are the real world and can produce different results. Lab tests are only a guide. All one has to do is look at the drug world of pharmaceutical.
Click to expand...

I'm surprised your not getting what I'm saying. How the heck do you do a CONTROLLED experiment when you bring in outside interference? Why do you take exception to this when I suggest it for people to try but you don't discount the studies that basically did the same thing? Show me an article/study where they test phosphate leaching in the tank versus a test tube or external/sterile tank.

Let me try again and see if I can explain it better.

I say it's pointless to test the specific leach factor of the carbon in the tank because organisms/rock/substrates will take up the phosphates, GFO could be removing it as fast as the carbon is leaching it, etc.

Now I'm not saying NOT to try adding or removing it from your tank to note the difference. That is also a VALID real world test but you can't tell the total amount of phosphates leached in one day, one week, one month doing that.

What I'm getting at is that doing it external you can see the carbon adding 1 ppm phosphate the first day and hold steady or it could slowly climb and be 1.9 on the 2nd day, 2.7 3rd day, 3.5 on 4th day, etc... If you test it for say 2 weeks (or how ever long your run the carbon for in your tank before changing it) you should have a pretty accurate knowledge of the total amount of phosphates that COULD be leached out of the carbon during it's typical usage in your tank. You can then see how much GFO it takes just to combat what the carbon leaches into the system before ever touching the phosphates from food, etc...

Now I did say COULD above because it's quite possible that as the carbon is used absorbing things it could either stay the same, increase in the leaching or the leaching could diminish. This in itself would make for another interesting test, starting with a known amount of dirty water and letting the carbon clean it while measuring the phosphates daily.

There are lots of ways to test things and I'd say they should be tested multiple ways instead of relying on one type of test that may not hold true all the time or only show one small part of the picture. This is how statistics lie. :)

For example the test that shows the amount of phosphates released in a previous article posted. What if the carbon was left in the solution and tested again in a week? Would it have been the same or more? Maybe one of the carbons that didn't look good at first would have released less phosphates overall and been the best. See what I'm getting at?

Carlo
 
NEWSALT

NEWSALT

Ran another test tonight.

Reactor Effluent: 0.06
Display Tank: 0.06

The display reading went down another 0.01, but the reactor went up 0.01. Now the display and the reactor are the same, 0.06. Would that mean that the media is spent and should be replaced?
 
C

Carlo

Try turning down the flow going into the reactor by 25%-50% and see what the Effluent comes out to. If it goes down try running it that way for a day. If it stays the same then try a new batch of GFO but try the decreased flow rate too. If you can slow the reactor down so the effluent is in the 0.02/.03 range I'll bet you'll see a much bigger difference overall. I think you may be pushing the water through the reactor to fast and it doesn't get the contact time it needs.

Save the old media just in case the new GFO doesn't drop it further.

Carlo
 
NEWSALT

NEWSALT

I slowed the reactor down a bit and got the following results:

Reactor Effluent went down to 0.04
Display went up ??? to 0.12

I going to try the display again maybe something went wrong with the test.

Update:

Checked the display again: 0.02 ;D

I don't know what happened with the first test. I know I saw a "1" in there.
 
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