Prosban Reactor

[Parnold]

Just fired one up, due to blooms of red slime. Checked my PO4 levels and they were between .5 and 1. I read this was too high and that one of these gadgets would help. How long do they take to work? When this thing does work and kills off the slime will that not create a nitrate spike? My nitrates are too high as it is. Will it create any other problems?

Parnoid Junior reefer

PS Thanks to the people who have taken time to answer some of questions in the past

[o.c.d.]

You want to be careful not to add to much media. Start low then increase many people think more is better not in this case. If you remove the po4 to fast all the bacteria feeding on the po4 will starve then decompose then pollute your tank causing a algal bloom. Slowly

[Parnold]

Thanks

I probably have done exactly what you said. The instructions had a max and min for media and I went with max as I am tired of algae problems. If I take some out is it reusable, it is expensive?

Paul

[whatcaneyedo]

Sounds like you're in the same situation I was in a few months ago. When I first tested for phosphate I got a reading of .5 so I started running 250ml of rowaphos (changing it each month) in a phosban reactor and I continued to do 10% (20gal) weekly water changes. I found this only brought my phosphate down to .25 and kept it there.

The rowaphos becomes saturated quite fast in my system, probably in as little as two weeks. So now I change it out more often and I've increased my water changes to 20% (40gals) each week. My phosphate currently measures at 0.1 but I want to bring it down lower still.

This is just my experiance so far but maybe it will help you. I also strain the packing water out of my frozen food before I feed it to the tank, I grow gracillaria macro algae in my fuge, and I dose kalkwasser with my top off. Some good reading can be found here:

http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-09/rhf/index.php
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-11/rhf/index.php