BRS GFO vs Seachum PhosGuard

  Fantastic.

I assume Burt uses a good skimmer and that's why he uses AC less often. For my systems, mostly skimmerless or underskimmed, AC becomes more important as it is run 2 weeks/mo. and in some cases it's used continuously.

Aloha,

Mark 

PO4 testing.

relethg wrote: I would like to us a sulfur reactor to control NO3 and P04 and do plan to give that a spin in the near future.

Sulfur reactor will do nothing for your P04. It effects N03 only. It is very effective at doing it as well, but no P04 effect at all. Just wanted to make sure you knew that.

There is a tiny amount used but most people running Sulfur denitrators find that it is not enough to keep their P04 in check without other means of control.

Would you share how you are exporting your P04 day to day when you don't throw in a bag of GFO? What is your bio load? I have approximately 95" of fish. I get about 1 gallon of skimmate a week, dark. Would like to have a better looking cat. Tried the bag of GFO and could not keep P04 bellow .075. Would love to need to dose phosphate.

Here we go - its about to get long and winded around here...

My corals export phosphate from day to day.  As your frags grown into colonies, you will find that they perform quite well at filtering the water.  Many have suggested this to occur, but until people got sick of pale coloration and started experimenting with dosing nutrients, did they actually see for themselves that tank inhabitants actually consume phosphate and nitrate.  Adam - owner of battle corals, check out his sps, amazing btw, has to dose a little from time to time as well for optimal health.  Here is a little message from him about it:

"YOUR SMALL POLYPED SCLERACTINIANS NEED NUTRIENTS!!! In fact, they need them so much, that I believe a well stocked reef full of SPS will act as its own nutrient reduction agent. Further simplifying any system by eliminating the need for some of the more recent methods and trends to do it. So there’s my claim. 

Far out? Maybe at first notion to all of you employing every effort to rid your tank of these nutrients, but hear me out. This is really is as simple as it gets, and is quite obvious once you think about it. I’m not a chemist nor scientist at all, but simply an extremely observant sps keeper at best, that has come to this realization after many years of housing, growing and abusing acroporas. 

But in all sincereness, this may not seem so far out anymore. This notion has slowly been gaining more and more traction over the last couple years. Even more so in recent months right here in R2R. It’s also one that I’ve been talking about for a long time now, and is a subject that I discuss often with fellow reefers struggling to troubleshoot, and wondering why things aren’t going as well as they'd like them to be.

In recent years, just as methods for removing nutrients have essentially gotten too efficient, I have to come to believe without a doubt, that stripping our water of even the smallest trace of nitrate or phosphate is far more deleterious on overall health, than moderately elevated, or even relatively high levels. I'll go even further to say that the benefits of measurable amounts of these vital nutrients tremendously exceeds that of a tank without. Now I never really subscribed the the phosphate is evil campaign that seemed to coincide rather conveniently with the introduction of binders such as ROWA and Phos Ban, roughly over a decade ago. While I do believe that it’s very possible, and likely that your tank will suffer at exceedingly higher levels than that of natural sea water, but that it will suffer far more at little or undetectable levels. To reiterate and perhaps reinforce my point just once more, I have seen with my own eyes, the issues that can come from exceedingly low or “stripped” levels of these nutrients, while I confess I am still waiting for the disaster that should accompany a higher or "dangerous" level. I am not saying that you are now free to abandon any means of keeping theses nutrients in check, nor to let them run wild. But rather, that I believe sps will not only keep these levels in check, but will actually deplete them much lower than we’d like as they use the nutrients up. 

So what does this really mean? Well, clearly a tank full of sps is not an easy thing to simply come up with like some macro for a fuge, or even a water change to dilute. And I’m not really suggesting that this is any sort of problem solver. I am merely stating that a well balanced system will keep itself in check when it comes to nutrients, and the production and depletion of them. In short, the longer your tank matures, and the more thriving and sprawling your sps get, the easier it will be to maintain acceptable levels of certain nutrients. Maintain being the key word. Some of us even going as far as to reintroduce various forms of nitrate back into the system when these levels are not met. With exceptional results."

Now, back to my thoughts:

I think we can blame the improved lighting technology for a lot of the moving trends.  Greater light/PAR = the need for greater nutrient dense water.  I'd only run a phosphate of <.03 if my lighting was PCs, 150 MHs, cheap reflectors, or poorly cooled T5 systems. 

Now, if your phosphate, left alone, untreated, kept rising and rising and rising - you have got a problem.  If you have very old Live rock, just leeching phosphate constantly due to years of neglect and saturation, yes, by all means run GFO heavily, before you stock. However, I wouldn't be concerned at all with a P04 reading of .075.  If you didn't treat with media, does it keep rising?  Do you only have frags? any colonies?

Now on to P04...

What effects on your coral does a P04 of .075 have on your system?  What number do you shoot for, and why?  Is there a particular reason you want it lower? Was it a trend target (in other words, everyone says >0.05) or does your tank show evidence of poor growth and death of sensitive corals at a phosphate level of .075?

Here is an awesome SPS tank are RC (this is also good reading) his runs a phosphate level between .1 to .3:

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2366953&highlight=phosphate

You likely won't believe me, but it is actually becoming quite popular to feed skimmate back to the tank.  Wonderful coral food.  Many SPS junkies are doing this for improved coloration and growth.  However, what I am trying to ultimately suggest is don't worry about chasing phosphate numbers so much.  The media if used controllably and correctly can reduce phosphate, but I would argue your corals need that phosphate and in more cases than not, it ends up causing coloration issues, base necrosis, and most importantly and OFTEN overlooked - sudden drifts in alkalinity (which is a whole other topic), that ends up actually causing the most harm.  You can use it, just be careful, especially at change out, to see if you get an alk drop each time.

It's a balancing act that can be difficult to explain/teach, especially because of so many variables, as quoted above by Burt. Due to the complexity of biological processes in animals and in the variances between aquariums, we are often left to learn by trial and error what works best for our reef aquarium. I just happened to come across an article I had bookmarked about the pros and cons of biopellets. It made me think...

Edited by Mark Peterson - May 12 2016 at 4:39pm

[QUOTE=bur01014]Here we go - its about to get long and winded around here[/QUOTE]

Edited by relethg - May 12 2016 at 6:44pm

Good input.  good discussion.