almost giving up on the hobby

[Spyd]

BRS is full of it if they are saying it's your water in the area... There is no way you should be getting anything more than 0.00ppm through your RO/DI unit. I live near Kitchener, ON and we pull water from the Grand River that is nasty as can be and I still get 0.00ppm from my Vertex unit.

Test your tap water for PO4. A lot of regions have very little PO4 actually in your water source. The PO4 comes from bioload and feeding. Are you over feeding your tank? How often and what do you feed your fish?

How many fish do you have and what size is your tank? Do you rinse your mysis, etc before feeding it to your fish?

How often do you replace your rowaphos and how much do you use at one time? It looks like you are making progress from reducing PO4 down to .15. I would suggest replacing GFO once a month for the time being.

Finally, what skimmer are you using? Before water changes, I would consider blowing off your rocks with a turkey baster as well to get out any trapped dietritus. How often are you changing out water and what percent of water volume are you roughly changing out?

HTH