Ever wonder where your phosphate comes from?

[bfliflet]

I did too especially after my phosphates spiked up after a change in my additive protocol. I got curious about a couple of items to see if one might be the cause of the spike. Disclaimer: This is not about specific products or recommendations or warnings. It's about not blindly trusting the quality, freshness or shelf-life of the products we use on a regular basis. It's possible some additives or foods could have affected the tests themselves.

I put a sample of aquarium water in to 4 vials and added a drop of the 3 products into 3 of the vials (one left as a reference).

The test was crude as is my faith in the test kit used (some test kits don't respond equally to organic vs inorganic phosphate) but off-the-scale is pretty bad. The last and the most worrisome is a popular amino acids additive that was given to me at least a year ago. Who knows how long they had it... Lesson learned.

 

[greenhead]

You are not going to even get close to a correct reading that way. I was thinking about doing this same test myself.

The correct way would be to take 1 gallon or certain number of liters, the smallest you could break down in comparison to the proper dose of that additive or what you generally dose. Like with the elos aminos. I dose 20 drops to 100 gallons so I would test it at 1 drop in 5 gallons. And try to create a method to where all the tests are broken up to use the same water volume. Test the sample water first so you have a control #. After dosing test again. Do this with each time using a fresh sample of water from same source. Other than initial control # of course since that should not change. This will give you the exact amount of p04 you are adding to your systems.

A chemical like elos aminos is so concentrated that one drop of it compared to one drop of phyto feast is no comparison. Look at the amount of acro power you have to add compared to elos aminos. When in fact they are almost identical in the amino acids they add. One just more concentrated. It's they way some companies work. They want you to feel your getting more for your buck. This is what used to set a company like Elos apart. That's of course before they got bought out by a bigger more money hungry company.

 

[bfliflet]

Definitely agree. I would have assumed food sources (KZ Coral Vitalizer and Phytofeast ) had more PO4. Relative dosing is important. I wasn't trying to quantify how much. It was more of a sanity check than anything else. I can't really compare PF to the others without correct dosing but KZ's CV is dosed similar to the ELOS AA. That tells me CV is much less of a problem, if any. To be fair to the products involved (as I like them all), I'll retest with realistic dosing.

 

[psykobowler]

Elos amino acid is da bomb! Around 30 bucks gets you a long way. I use 2 full squirts daily myself. Fat fish and healthy corals.

 

[NittyGritty]

Very fat fish.... Damn chromis are like tuna...

 

[psykobowler]

Yup, lol.

 

[GreshamH]

Given there is no phosphate added to Phyto-Feast and the phosphate in the cells is locked up, I can pretty much tell you your testing methodology is not the way to do this.

 

[BJCollie]

Very interesting. I agree your concentration may be high, at that concentration the PO4 seems low for the first two.

I am curious under your test conditions how does a drop of tap water compare? My guess is, off the chart.

 

[bfliflet]

Given there is no phosphate added to Phyto-Feast and the phosphate in the cells is locked up, I can pretty much tell you your testing methodology is not the way to do this.

Again agreed. I suspect most hobbyist test kits only test inorganic phosphate. Organic phosphate bound up in the phytoplankton releases into the system through biological processes. As a result, I would guess results to be even higher. The amounts measured are likely the result of decomposition while sitting on a shelf or in my fridge. What is surprising is that I wouldn't expect significant inorganic PO4 with organic additives. Isn't PO4 used in various forms of preservatives which aren't necessarily bad? Is it possible my suspect aminos had decomposed into among other stuff inorganic PO4?

 

[greenhead]

I wish I still had my hanna p04 checker. Would be nice to do these same series of tests using more commonly used foods. Especially to see if my obsessive over rinsing of the frozen foods I use in my tank. Especially the PE mysis and the LRS reef foods.

 

[GreshamH]

I wish I still had my hanna p04 checker. Would be nice to do these same series of tests using more commonly used foods. Especially to see if my obsessive over rinsing of the frozen foods I use in my tank. Especially the PE mysis and the LRS reef foods.

RHF did just that and wrote an article (albeit LRS was not on the market yet).

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2012/3/chemistry

Problem is, nearly all of PO4 should be locked up in the feed itself. Most frozen feed manufacturers do not add phosphate, or phosphorus. Its a building block of life, its in all we feed, and its needed.

Rinsing Foods and the Effect on Phosphate
Now that we have some information on the phosphate in foods, we can critically examine the concern that many aquarists have about foods, and specifically their rinsing of frozen foods before use. A typical test you see is someone taking a cube of fish food, thawing it, and putting it into a half cup of water. They then test that water for phosphate and find it "off the charts". Let's assume that means 1 ppm phosphate, which would give a very dark blue color in many phosphate tests. Bear in mind this is a thought problem, not an actual measured value, but it is typical of what people think the answer is.

Is that a lot of phosphate? Well, there are two ways to think of the answer.

The first way is as a portion of the total phosphate in that food. A half cup of water at 1 ppm (1 mg/L) phosphate contains a total of 0.12 mg of phosphate. A cube of Formula 2 contains about 11.2 mg of phosphate. So the hypothetical rinsing step has removed about 1 percent of the phosphate in that food. Not really worthwhile, in my opinion, but that decision is one every aquarist can make for themselves.

The second way to look at this rinsing is with respect to how much it reduces the boost to the aquarium phosphate concentration. Using the same calculation as above of 0.12 mg of phosphate, and adding that to 100 gallons total water volume, we find that phosphate that was rinsed away would have boosted the "in tank" phosphate concentration by 0.12 mg/379 L = 0.0003 ppm. That amount washed away does not seem significant with respect to the "in tank" target level of about 50-100 times that level (say, 0.015 to 0.03 ppm), nor does it seem significant relative to the total amount of phosphate actually added each day in foods (which is perhaps 50-1000 times as much, based on input rates from Table 4. Again, the conclusion I make is that rinsing is not really worthwhile, in my opinion.