I recently started seeing green hair algae in my 75G tank. It's not taking over the tank yet, but last week I realized that I was seeing more and more every day and I didn't want to let it get to the point where it was taking over the tank.
My phosphate was measuring around .75 ppm. It was Thursday last week that I realized that I needed to do something to bring the phosphate down before the GHA got out of control. I decided that my long term solution was going to be an algae scrubber, so I ordered one. Unfortunately it wasn't going to arrive until Tuesday.
On Friday I woke up and saw even more GHA and I decided that I needed a short term solution to keep the algae at bay until my scrubber arrived. That short term solution turned out to be the Kent Phosphate Sponge because it was inexpensive and available locally at Petco. I bought a small media bag to go with it, put about half of the package of phosphate sponge in the bag and stuck in between two partitions in my sump.
From what I saw, two days was about the best I could expect before the media was exhausted, so I planned to use that until Sunday, then change it out for the other half and use that until Tuesday when my scrubber arrived. I tested for phosphates on Saturday and Sunday and they seemed to be coming down a little, but not significantly. I was down to about .5ppm on Sunday. The GHA still seemed to be growing, but I believe it slowed down a bit.
As I was changing the media out, it occurred to me that there was room on both sides of the media bag and I suspected that the water was flowing around the media rather than through it. So I picked up another filter bag and split the remaining media between the two bags. This time I stuffed them under one of the partitions next to each other across the width of the sump, so the water would need to flow through the bags.
This definitely worked better... by Monday the phosphates were under .25ppm and on Tuesday they were maybe just a hair above 0.0 and the GHA growth had pretty well stopped.
On Tuesday I pulled the phosphate sponge and installed the new scrubber. There's no growth in the scrubber yet and I don't expect to see much there for at least another week or two, but I'm starting to see a bit more phosphate... I tested this morning and it's probably around .1ppm. I haven't seen significant GHA growth, though, so that's good.
The inhabitants of my tank seemed to tolerate it pretty well. I didn't notice any changes in the behavior of my fish or clean up crew, nor my anemone's or most of my corals. The changes I did notice are these: My frogspawn and torch didn't seem to extend quite as much as normal while the phosphate sponge was in the sump (maybe 80 or 90%). My purple sea blade built up a pretty thick coat (thicker than I've seen before with that coral) and stayed closed for those four days, but my other gorgonians didn't seem to be affected. I was most worried about my green star polyps... they closed up almost immediately when I added the phosphate sponge and stayed closed the whole time it was in there, but they recovered within a day or so and are back out now without any problems.
So in short, I think the phosphate sponge did exactly what I needed it to and it was a pretty good short term solution. I wouldn't want to run it all the time as a long term solution because the cost would add up pretty quickly (I went through a $13 jug in 4 days) and it did seem to have a minor effect on a few of my corals (mostly the GSP's)
My phosphate was measuring around .75 ppm. It was Thursday last week that I realized that I needed to do something to bring the phosphate down before the GHA got out of control. I decided that my long term solution was going to be an algae scrubber, so I ordered one. Unfortunately it wasn't going to arrive until Tuesday.
On Friday I woke up and saw even more GHA and I decided that I needed a short term solution to keep the algae at bay until my scrubber arrived. That short term solution turned out to be the Kent Phosphate Sponge because it was inexpensive and available locally at Petco. I bought a small media bag to go with it, put about half of the package of phosphate sponge in the bag and stuck in between two partitions in my sump.
From what I saw, two days was about the best I could expect before the media was exhausted, so I planned to use that until Sunday, then change it out for the other half and use that until Tuesday when my scrubber arrived. I tested for phosphates on Saturday and Sunday and they seemed to be coming down a little, but not significantly. I was down to about .5ppm on Sunday. The GHA still seemed to be growing, but I believe it slowed down a bit.
As I was changing the media out, it occurred to me that there was room on both sides of the media bag and I suspected that the water was flowing around the media rather than through it. So I picked up another filter bag and split the remaining media between the two bags. This time I stuffed them under one of the partitions next to each other across the width of the sump, so the water would need to flow through the bags.
This definitely worked better... by Monday the phosphates were under .25ppm and on Tuesday they were maybe just a hair above 0.0 and the GHA growth had pretty well stopped.
On Tuesday I pulled the phosphate sponge and installed the new scrubber. There's no growth in the scrubber yet and I don't expect to see much there for at least another week or two, but I'm starting to see a bit more phosphate... I tested this morning and it's probably around .1ppm. I haven't seen significant GHA growth, though, so that's good.
The inhabitants of my tank seemed to tolerate it pretty well. I didn't notice any changes in the behavior of my fish or clean up crew, nor my anemone's or most of my corals. The changes I did notice are these: My frogspawn and torch didn't seem to extend quite as much as normal while the phosphate sponge was in the sump (maybe 80 or 90%). My purple sea blade built up a pretty thick coat (thicker than I've seen before with that coral) and stayed closed for those four days, but my other gorgonians didn't seem to be affected. I was most worried about my green star polyps... they closed up almost immediately when I added the phosphate sponge and stayed closed the whole time it was in there, but they recovered within a day or so and are back out now without any problems.
So in short, I think the phosphate sponge did exactly what I needed it to and it was a pretty good short term solution. I wouldn't want to run it all the time as a long term solution because the cost would add up pretty quickly (I went through a $13 jug in 4 days) and it did seem to have a minor effect on a few of my corals (mostly the GSP's)
