Iron dosing: feosol carbonyl iron

[wolfoholic]

read the reefkeeping artivles and the authors article on iron dosing. now i had feosol carbonyl iron tablets i picked up at walgreens - didnt want to use the ones with sulfate or phophate so i decided to go with this brand.
it contains 45mg iron per tablet. I dissolved 3 tablets in ro water. thinking of dosing it to a 40gallon tank. but i want to confirm so that i am not going to overdose and crash the tank.

1 is it safe?
2 how many ml per gallon how many times per week.

cant find much on this drug for reefdosing so any help would be appreciated. THANKS!

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[Brent6b]

I was playing around with dosing iron, different product but after my gold milli turned green I quit. I really liked Red Sea iron test kit. Start out slow and test often. Tiny amounts go a long long way. I was using less than a ml a week on a 200 gal mixed reef.

 

[bertoni]

That appears to be elemental iron, with no chelating agent. It should be safe, if the impurities are acceptable, but I don't think it'll remain in the water column long enough to be of use. I would get a chelated supplement of some sort. This article goes into why chelation is important:

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2002/8/chemistry

 

[wolfoholic]

i read that and made my selection on the iron supplement based on that. Which one should i get then i cant find the one mentioned.

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[bertoni]

I don't know what you might have available. This recipe from the article should be fine:

Deciding how much iron to add is fairly easy because, in my experience, it doesn't seem to matter too much. Presumably, once you add enough to eliminate iron as a limiting nutrient, extra iron does not apparently cause harm (at least that I've detected in my tanks or heard of from others). I selected a dose of about 0.1 to 0.3 mL of a solution containing 5 g of iron (as 25 g of ferrous sulfate heptahydrate) in 250 mL of water containing 50.7 g of sodium citrate dihydrate. This liquid is dosed 2-3 times per week to my system with a total water volume of about 250 gallons. This iron(II) citrate has turned brown and cloudy since I first made up the bottle years ago, suggesting that it is oxidizing to iron(III) and some is precipitating from solution, but I still use it. Over the past 4 years, I've dosed nearly all of the 5 grams of actual iron to my tank.

This thread has more informations:

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1807946

 

[wolfoholic]

Bertoni, and I had read that as well. I am trying to find the one used here. Do you think carbonyl iron would work?

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[bertoni]

It might be better than nothing. I just worry a bit about the impurity profile. The good part about using food-grade or pet-grade products is that (at least in theory) the contaminants have been checked.

 

[wolfoholic]

It's not my own creation here is the drug packaging. What do u think?

 

[rbirling]

Were you not able to find the stuff in Randy's article, or just want to try something else?

 

[wolfoholic]

Couldn't find it. Thinking of returning this but as long as I can't find the right stuff its not worth it. The one chelated one I found had sulfur in it.

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[rbirling]

I was able to get ferrous sulfate heptahydrate and sodium citrate dihydrate from chemicalstore.com, if that helps.

 

[wolfoholic]

That would make salt but it's not chelated is it?

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[bertoni]

The citrate will chelate the iron. That supplement should be fine.

 

[wolfoholic]

The one I have or the citrate thing? Doesn't the sulfate have ill effects on the tank?

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[bertoni]

There's a lot of sulfate in saltwater:

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2005-11/rhf/index.php#5

A little more won't hurt.

The citrate will chelate the ferrous sulfate. The powder you have would need to oxidize first. The citrate might do that, but I'd stick with the ferrous sulfate.

 

[wolfoholic]

Do you have an article or research paper explaining chelation im pretty good with Chem. Bio engineer..

 

[wolfoholic]

and wouldn't it oxidized on its own

 

[wolfoholic]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_pentacarbonyl

I don't see how this is not going to work.

According to this definition of chelation from Wikipedia (I know I know it's wikipedia), it would be chelated by five CO ligands.
What do you think?

[ Chelation is the formation or presence of two or more separate coordinate bonds between a polydentate

(multiple bonded) ligand and a single central atom. [1]

Usually these ligands are organic compounds, and are called chelants, chelators, chelating agents, or sequestering agents.

The ligand forms a chelate complex with the substrate. Chelate complexes are contrasted with coordination complexes composed of monodentate ligands, which form only one bond with the central atom.]

 

[bertoni]

The iron might oxidize on its own. I'm not very good with that kind of chemistry. Another concern I have is impurities.

I think the iron that you have, from your description, isn't iron pentacarbonyl, but elemental iron that has been purified from iron pentacarbonyl. I am not sure what your product is, though. See the Wikipedia article on "carbonyl iron".

What exactly do you have? I thought you had a powder, which would be carbonyl iron.

 

[wolfoholic]

I have the tablets that I took the picture of earlier I crushed them and dissolved the powder in ro water

Now as far as i understand my chemistry it seems like a chelated molecule to me. I purity is increased but that is the only way you can for a carbonyl around an iron molecule it will be a pentacarbonyl in its most stable form

And pentacarbonyl is by the definitions I have read a chelated molecule. I wish someone with solid knowledge in ochem and reef Chem could chime in here. The other stuff in the tablets can't be bad, but most of it has settled to the bottom of the bottle, and the iron should be suspended from what I understand. I wish I had an iron test to check out the parameters in the bottle but iron can take so many forms its almost impossible to measure the exact amount and what percentile of which is usable to organisms. Much like iodine (lugols) is hard to measure.

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