I scoured the internet for information on MarinePure and ended up purchasing both the brick and spheres from reefsupplies.ca. To answer your question, the material itself is so porous that it will crumble if you apply too much force with your grip. You can very easily cut it with a steak or bread knife but I would recommend using a hacksaw – this is something that can be done and cleaned up in 10 minutes.
As for aluminum leaching, there are too many reports in my opinion to call it coincidence. That being said, the dose makes the poison with anything and so long as a person minimizes their risk I still believe it's a relatively safe product. I rinsed and soaked it for a week in prime before adding it slowly to my sump and haven't observed any detrimental effects.
I have yet to find any real quantified data for the effectiveness of MarinePure. I don't believe it is a miracle product but should rather be thought as a supplement to liverock. Where I think a lot of people overlook its value is in the bricks' potential to host denitrifying bacteria. My reasoning goes something like this… We all know that larger tanks offer more stability and capacity for bioload. The larger water volume itself, doesn't really offer much other than the principle of concentration/dilution. So it seems fair to think that a significant portion of the stability comes from having more surface area in sand or liverock. Now, the issue with maximizing surface area is that for the first stages of the nitrogen cycle, carbon is often the limiting factor – this is where carbon dosing intervenes. But for the later stages, where nitrate is finally converted into nitrogen gas it is theorized that anaerobic sites are the limiting factor – this is where large bricks like the 8x8x4" MarinePure blocks are thought to intervene. All that put in short terms, I bought the MarinePure block for an area of low flow in my sump in hopes that it will aid in controlling nitrates and I bought the spheres for the chamber of my sump where I dose my carbon source in hope that the bacteria will grow on their surface then spill downstream into my skimmer – thus aid in controlling phosphates. I've had this all in place for about 2 weeks and I'll post a picture once I'm home. What do you guys think? is this a reasonable thought process or a far stretch where I've fallen victim to marketing?
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