Lanthanum chloride

Slief, I love that sump/sock setup! The makes changing the filter socks so easy without the pipe draining directly into it. Genius!
 
short of sounding stupid , it looks as though all the bags are 32" long or am i missing something ? if they all are they certainly could be shortened with a sewing machine .
 
thanks for the link and thats what i am looking for ! seems like you have to purchase 25 of them but thats okay by me especialy when they are the right size .
 
Give them a call and you can order how many ever you want. I got my 50 micron from them and have been wanting to order some 5 & 10's so I can start dosing.

Anyone in for a group order?
 
which would be the best material to get as far as durability? nylon felt, polyester felt, polypropylene felt I have a DIY socks made from polyester felt and have never purchased filter socks before.
 
I thought i might try and get a little more serious with this and have set up a small experiment to see if my ideas work. if all goes OK i will set it up a little better. For interest sake my tank is approximately 1100 litres and i am using Starver as my source of La(gly).

I have used a 10 inch water filter canister with a 10 micron pleated filter cartridge. I plan to pump water through the filter at 10 litres per minute with a small Eheim pump and dose in the lanthanum via a dsoing pump from a 5 litre container filled with RO/DI water with 5 ml of lanthanum diluted in it (How much should i add to the 5 litres??????). I expect to dose around 10 ml/minute of diluted lanthanum and play with this amount. I will do some calcs to work out how much lanthanum i am adding per 10 litres of water per minute. I am not sure if anyone out there is any good at chemistry but i would figure that based on the assumption that the lanthanum binds with 1ppm phosphate for every 5 ppm La(gly) someone could work out how much phosphate i could bind up per minute of flow???????

1. Filter housing with 1/4 inch john guest fitting for tube from dosing pump
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2. Red container in background to hold the 5 litres of water and lanthanum
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One option will be to add a primary mixing container such as another water filter hosing (with no filter) or maybe a custom made acrylic reactor prior to the housing with the filter to act as a reaction chamber to get a better mix and reaction. I will also try standard 10 micron filter cartridges but i fear the flow rate would be greatly reduced and the pressure required to high. The pleated filter cartridges are good for upto around 38 litres per minute flow (around 10 gallons).
 
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Marc, your setup is what I have thought of trying myself. One question/comment/concern is should you have a check valve between the T for the dosing pump and the supply pump, the thinking being if your supply pump is off and your dosing pump is not you may push the lanthanum solution straight into the tank.

My thought was to use a dual chamber housing (like the BRS reactors or a dual DI setup) and use one for mixing and one for filtering like you mentioned, but I to wonder if that would be enough mixing time.

Joe
 
I've run a bottle over the last couple of months. I'm not a fan of it, yet there's little question it works for Gary very well.

I used it more frequently than Gary recommended so that may be the cause, but I lost a clam from it for sure. I've also noticed that snails seem to be "anesthetized" by the lanth which is weird.

Also, I bought 10 micron socks, either they're not 10 micron as advertised (which wouldn't surprise me) or 10 microns doesn't filter it out, the socks I used didn't "catch" what I saw collected in Gary's socks.

I found in my particular case, vacuuming the sand and frequent water changes were what was needed.

I'm not slamming lanth, it's just didn't work in my case, for what I was hoping to do. Hope my observations contribute in some small way.
 
Kent, are you using the same brand (SeaKlear) that other folks in the thread have been using? I have been using the Leslie's Pool supply brand, and I'm led to believe that it's much more dilute than SeaKlear. I'm dosing between 10-20 mL each time, and I haven't seen as much precipitation as Gary's pics, nor have I seen any of the inhabitants react to the addition.
 
I strongly suspect you were overdosing it, Kent.
What product were you using and what size was the bottle?

Were you able to take a reading with a Hanna colorimeter?
 
some examples:
one gallon SeaKlear bottle can last between 2-3 months on the 20,000 gallon reef aquarium @ Atlantis Marineworld (according to Joe Yauillo.)

In my own (reather heavily stocked) 225 gallon reef aquarium I'm still on the same bottle that I started using in the autumn of 2008.

A true 10 micron sock should clog up visibly during a dosing- otherwise something is wrong. Your skimmer should also be visibly affected.
 
I had a liter of Sea Kleer. I'd dilute 20 ml in a gallon of water and then would dose a half gallon a day, or there-a-bouts. Taking a break some days. After the clam croaked I really dropped the usage. I have a colormeter and the phos would drop mildly and then rise up again.

But.... the sand was HORRIBLE, far worse than I ever imagined sand could get. This was due to not reefkeeping for a year while I took care of some other things in life.

The vacuuming is really working wonders so it makes lanth less attractive for my particular case. But perhaps most people don't have the sand issue that I had.

In the last month or so of vacuuming/waterchange has turned utter green-cyano-death everywhere to clear water and coraline. This process is working and I'm looking at it as if it can make this huge of a difference (death-life) than likely I'll keep the reef clean for infinite-um using this process. But that's a different thread.

Likely, I overdosed in duration rather than quantity. In doing so, you lose clams, snails get drunk, oh and the tang heavy-breathing thing.
 
Marc, your setup is what I have thought of trying myself. One question/comment/concern is should you have a check valve between the T for the dosing pump and the supply pump, the thinking being if your supply pump is off and your dosing pump is not you may push the lanthanum solution straight into the tank.

My thought was to use a dual chamber housing (like the BRS reactors or a dual DI setup) and use one for mixing and one for filtering like you mentioned, but I to wonder if that would be enough mixing time.

Joe

Both the dosing pump and eheim will run off the same power supply on a timer so they will both stop at the same time. I will also maintain the canister and output higher than the storage container for the lanthanum. I really dont know about the mixing and was thinking that i might look at a larger custom housing to mix the water and lanthanum in prior to going into the fiter housing. It would just have to be able to handle and pressure build up.
 
i did some calcs and i hope i got this right. At 5ml of La(gly) diluted in 5 litres of RO/DI water at a flow rate of 10 litres/minute i expect to have around 0.17 microlitres of lanthanum mixing with around 170 millilitres of tank water per second.

Is anyone smart enough to work out how much phosphate this could precipitate out if i used the ration of 1ppm phosphate for each 5ppm La(gly)?
 
I've switched to a different method recently--I dose 3mL into the weir box over the course of 60 minutes, and I've actually shortened it to 40 minutes in some cases. I haven't noticed any issues with this at all. Total system volume is 300g.

FWIW, my tank turnover through the weir box is about 4x per hour, so theoretically (assuming zero "short circuiting"), I could do this as fast as 15 minutes and still be dosing LaCl to the entire water volume.

The upside of this is that I only have to run the 10 micron sock for about an hour, and then it is much much easier to clean.
 
thanks for that update, Matt.

As long as one is very careful and extremely observant I'm sure their are numerous ways to go about administering lanthanum products safely and effectively.
 
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