Phosphate question

[jason7274]

I tested my water tonight and everything looked good except phosphate. Overall, tank is 4 months old, but I did transfer everything from a 36g BF to a 40B about 3 weeks ago. The results were consistent before and after the swap with the only spike in phosphate tonight. It has been .01 forever. Any thoughts on why it would be high? I’ve got 30lbs of LR and 4 frags of softies and 2 frags of LPS. (2 softies were added this past weekend)

Here are the results from tonight:
ALK - 10
PH - 8.0
NH3 - 0.0
NO2 - 0.0
NO3 - 10.0
CA - 400
PO4 - 1.0

Would water changes lower it? I’m running a canister and clean it every weekend, should o throw something in there like a filter or Bag of something?

 

[ichthyoid]

Did you retest your be sure it’s not testing error?

Granular ferric oxide can be used in a filter bag to remove phosphate by adsorption.

Moving substrate & rock between tanks can release/stir up phosphate.

Water changes can help, especially large ones. They also might upset chemistry or corals. So be careful.

Based on the age of the system, both your NO3 & phosphate make it appear like you may be feeding heavy and/or using a lot of flake food. Is that the case?

 

[jason7274]

Thanks for the info. Yes, I tested twice with new water on the second one.

I’ve got 2 Clowns, Firefish, Blenny and a YWG with 2 shrimp (Pistol and Cleaner) feeding twice a day using frozen Marine Cuisine. One block lasts about 3-4 days. The YWG and Pistol get a few extra pellets dropped in front of their cave. Is that to much? I did a 10% water change on Sunday vacuuming the substrate, maybe I stirred some up as well.

 

[jcook54]

Are you having any issues? The PO4 is certainly high but if you're not having any issues I wouldn't do anything major. Transferring tanks can throw things out of whack for a while and it'll take time for things to settle back in to a groove. If I were you, I wouldn't change much as long as everything it looking alright. Give it another week or two and see where things are. If PO4 is still high, I'd try some GFO in a bag. It's not the most efficient way of using GFO (a reactor is better) but I like the inefficiency of GFO in a bag. You can really strip PO4 out of the system too fast with a reactor and it's much less likely to happen with bagged GFO.

 

[tkallday]

Water changes should lower any nutrient excess from food. It it's leaching for live rocks it will keep it in check, but not get rid of it so much.

Not worth chasing PO4 if corals are doing fine though and no algae issues.