Iodine Bottle Contamination?

seanm001

Member
I bought a bottle of Kent Iodine about two and a half weeks ago and have been dosing the tank every day. I randomly looked in the bottle a few days ago and noticed little poofy things suspended in the solution. They appear to be a really dark green and look like little pom poms. I noticed tonight a couple of spots on the surface of the inside of the bottle.

Is this some kind of algae? Is it normal for it to be in there? Should I be worried? Maybe take the bottle back to the store?

The weird thing is, the dropper never comes into contact with the tank, so I don't know how algae could have been introduced and the bottle is opaque, so there's no light coming in to grow algae.

Thanks!
 
I doubt there's anything growing in the supplement. It might be a precipitate of some form. Are you using Tech-I?
 
isnt iodine a sterilizer? ( or is it sanitizer?)

eitehr way.. no nothing growing in it. ( if lugals)
 
Kent sells three different iodine products, and they would have different attributes with respect to bacterial growth in them. That said, I wouldn't worry about it, although in general I do not believe that iodine dosing is useful for most reef tanks.
 
The product I'm using is labeled as "Concentrated Iodine" and is called Kent Superiodine on That Pet Place and other websites, but it's not listed on Kent's website. I don't have the bottle with me right now, but the ingredients I found listed on the web are deionized water, iodide salts, and stabilizers.

My initial thought also was some kind of precipitate, but it just seems to be too poofy to be a precipitate unless it's some kind of crystalline ball, and the fact that there are spots of it on the sides of the bottle is weird.

I don't usually dose iodine (or iodide) but I picked up a bleached sebae anemone a few weeks ago and I thought I'd dose the tank for a few weeks to try and help the anemone's zooxanthellae recover.

I think maybe I'll run the solution through a coffee filter to get out the floating bits, put the solution back in the bottle, and see if the poofy balls return. That'll at least keep me from accidentally adding the unknown bits to the tank.
 
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Years ago My parents had a printing business and we would mix
up the water with a chemical that made it "weter than water"
(I guess it would lower the surface tension).

Sometimes in the bottle it would form a mass my dad would call.
a "mother" (as in a chemical term) never really asked him to
define what it was.

Could be something simmilar.
 
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