Fighting cyano algae - what's best phosphate remover???

[wayne]

I have just won a war with cyano...

I increased my flow, and checked my aquascaping to make sure it was effective. I have about 15 times an hour
I did some pretty frequent gravel hoovering (of my sand bed) to get out as much gunk as possible. I got my skimerworking, and did the hoovering as part of a 10% weeklychange.
I used IO salt, but supplemented my alk to a constant 12
I kept my salinity up at 1.025 - I started to get problems during a round of hypo treatment (which is pretty normal)
I didn't fiddle with my lights.
I used Rowaphos to get the phosphate out. For a while when you add phosphate to a tank it is bound to the carbonate material in there and doesn't register on a test kit. So when it does start to register , you know you have a lot!

It took me two months to get my war won. I never once considered chemicals.

 

[RJJ_EXPERT]

try posguard (seachem) or rophos-spelling
Or the natural way like caupera which can become a more manageible and attractive problem or in a refugium sometime bio fliters become phosphate problems may be a effient skimmer would help but caulerpa would be the cheapest it like $10 at the store or prbally free from any one with to much of it.

 

[richtpe]

An update on this - I started using PhosBan - phosphates were a little over 0.5. Several days later they were down to 0 and have stayed there since. IMO a huge advantage this tye of phosphate sponge (I think roaphos is a similar type) has over the Kent Marine type is that you can leave it in indefefinitely without worrying about phosphates leaching back into the sysytem. Kent's instructions say to take it out after two days max.

On another happy note I finally won my battle with cyano - without chemicals, thanks to all the great suggestions I got off this board. So now that that's over, it should be all smooth sailing from here on out.....right???

I'm posting some pics of my - now cyano free - tank just because I'm pretty happy about how it's looking these days.

 

[vcelani]

make sure you are doing water changes with distilled water.

 

[richtpe]

oops..sorry. Had a tough time getting the pics down to size.

 

[wayne]

As a note phosphate removers are typically aluminium based (Seachem) or Iron based (Rowaphos, Julian Sprung). Aluminium based ones seem to badly affect zo's and softies , and there are lesser rumours sps corals don't like Fe based ones much.