Phosphates

I noticed my phosphates are getting a little high. Ive been looking up different solutions on the net and came accross something saying carbon causes high phospahtes. Also salt mixes do too. Is this true?

 

Not really, most comes from food that you feed your aquarium, GFO is your best friend for removing it. Best to maintain around .04 ppm After all corals utilize algae within their cells and algae uses small amounts of phosphate to grow. But to much phosphate and it inhibits growth also. Generally you will get better color out of SPS when you can maintain very small amounts of it.

 

Is .25 high on an api test kit?

 

Its hight, but not a killer. I use Phosban to help get it back to lower levels. It hard unless you have a real good setup.

 

.25 is pretty high. .05 is considered the highest recommended level for sps corals

 

GFO is your best bet to lower phosphate

 

I use ro water and do a once a week water change, I only feed one time a day, why would it be so high?

 

What food do you feed? A lot of food is high in phosphate. also where did you get your live rock from. cause if you got your live rock from a system that had high phosphate it can be absorbed into the live rock then leach out into your system

 

Liverock came from different people over the years. Every piece I have has coral on it so cooking it is not an option. So if I ran gfo through my system will that eventually get rid of it. I use all different types of food.

 

Another question do bio balls create phosphates? I have an all glass sump i believe by aqueon and if I remove the bio balls it makes alot of dripping noise. Remember my nitrates test 0 even with the bio balls.

 

So, I got a tank with rocks that had some nitrates and phosphates in them. I started running a 2 little fishes 150 reactor with GFO on it and the tank cleaned up in a couple of months. It was quite impressive really. Nitrates in the 80 ppm and phosphates in the 0.5 to 1 range. I did weekly 20% water changes with that and now am at 5 ppm nitrate and virtually 0 phosphate.

 

Got some gfo today from acc

 

Do you have a reactor?