Regenerating GFO

[gary faulkner]

So I talked to someone about the septic tank/ lye/ saltwater mix. Saltwater would have no ill effects on a septic system, lye would cause your beneficial bacteria to die off, but they would always come back. So if you were to dump it(lye), you could just neautralize it with muriatic acid. I know that these chemicals are harmful, but so are alot of things in this hobby. Our lights emit harmful rays, kalkwasser is harmful if breathed in, c02 tanks can leak, and I can't tell you how many times I've seen the "I'll just plug one more thing in this outlet" syndrome. It's amazing what we do for our glass tanks, risking life and limb!! I think if you decide to do it as I have, just go slow and be careful. Good luck and Happy Reefing...

Thanks Rob, I think I'm going to do this, just have to work out the small details now. Being able to neutralize and dump down the drain will make it a little safer to handle as the transfer to a dump site was a concern. Thanks again.

 

[rob.mwpropane]

Just passing on the info....

 

[badpacket]

Many props to jptenklooster, tatuvaaj, ScooterTDI and others for their work on this thread.
Its a shame that there always seems to be someone looking to grab other's work and attempt to pass it off as their own.
I'll leave my rant at http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2010/10/chemistry

I doubly surprised no one has bothered writing AA to ask for some Editorial Review and full disclosure considering the paper trail. The aforementioned posters did a lion's share of the work that was later copied by Matt, and should get some mention at a minimum.

 

[USC-fan]

/\/\Doest seem that big of a deal....

 

[badpacket]

In the big scheme of things, your right.

A fair number of people seemed to go the extra mile working this out for everyone's benefit. A couple who did relatively little seemed to take the credit. Priceless.

/\/\Doest seem that big of a deal....

 

[SimonSKL]

Many people would benefit from a concise and well written summary instead of reading thru pages of the thread. For that I appreciate the efforts of those who took the time to do it.

 

[Matt_Wandell]

In the big scheme of things, your right.

A fair number of people seemed to go the extra mile working this out for everyone's benefit. A couple who did relatively little seemed to take the credit. Priceless.

The credit can go to whomever you want it to go to. I certainly don't need any credit.

Your accusation that we copied any data is completely false.

 

[Matt_Wandell]

Many people would benefit from a concise and well written summary instead of reading thru pages of the thread. For that I appreciate the efforts of those who took the time to do it.

Thanks, Simon. I am not sure how this article was taken so far out of context. It's just a recipe that we generated from some testing and a simple "how to" guide.

 

[GreshamH]

Thanks, Simon. I am not sure how this article was taken so far out of context. It's just a recipe that we generated from some testing and a simple "how to" guide.

I watched you and several CAS people hash this out, saw your results and I can firmly attest to what you say above.

I've known you for just about a decade now and I have never really seen you do anything for personal recognition.

Fred, you I have also known for a decent amount of time, so you should know I'm a straight shooter. It's nothing like you claim it is.

 

[qfrisco]

I'm soon going to run out of GFO and plan to try this out in the coming weeks. Once I'm ready to reload my reactor with freshly regenerated GFO (which I'm planning to store wet which is what folks appear to be doing), are there any tips simplifying transferring of the GFO? Pouring dry GFO into my reactor sounds a lot simpler than dumping wet GFO.

How have folks been doing it? By spoon? Any tips?

EDIT: Has anyone tried drying the GFO after regeneration?

 

[Boomer]

I will have to put in my 2 cents here. First, I agree with Gresh and Simon. However, some credit should have been given to jptenklooster, tatuvaaj, ScooterTDI and RC should have been sighted. When I first started to read the article the first thing that came to mine is where is tatuvaaj in it.

 

[qfrisco]

Quick question on rinsing: I've gone through approx 15 gallons of RO/DI rinsing approx 8 cups of regenerated GFO and the water still has a brownish tint. Are folks rinsing until the brownish tint no longer happens?

 

[Chyendra]

This thread is great, I definitely going to give this a try.

I'm laughing a little about the debate of putting NaOH down the drain... Isn't this product used as a drain opener? Anyway, better safe than sorry I suppose

Thanks again for all the great info guys!

 

[badpacket]

Gresham,

You can vouch for the guy, fine

All I -know-, though, is what appears to be a more than insignificant amount of work that was done, when someone new popped up into a discussion ans research that had been on-going for several months, who later appeared to just duplicate testing and do a nice write-up. Its pretty obvious who knew what and when from their posting dates.

The article sure came across to me as if the author deduced this by himself, a la a wunder-kid.

I am quite sure if I went down to Reed's for a tour, and then started posting how to culture algae or pods using Reed's process without any cites or credit given to Reed's in a similar vein as this paper, that you might call foul, and claim this was someone who simply copied your 'intellectual property' or similar.

I'll be fair and admit some of my assumptions are probably outright wrong, and unfair, for which anyone can ding me.

However not giving anyone else attribution, credit, or just being honest with the reader and mentioning that you found the information online and duplicated it in testing, comes across to me as trying to take credit for the work of others.
I've worked in the bio-tech industry for a well over a decade where simple osmosis of casual perusal of standard research materials always shows cites of previous work, and I do recall many of Randy's articles often times mention that certain chemicals, processes or ideas have come from online sources or are common knowledge among the reefing community.

I watched you and several CAS people hash this out, saw your results and I can firmly attest to what you say above.

I've known you for just about a decade now and I have never really seen you do anything for personal recognition.

Fred, you I have also known for a decent amount of time, so you should know I'm a straight shooter. It's nothing like you claim it is.

 

[Matt_Wandell]

All I -know-, though, is what appears to be a more than insignificant amount of work that was done, when someone new popped up into a discussion ans research that had been on-going for several months, who later appeared to just duplicate testing and do a nice write-up. Its pretty obvious who knew what and when from their posting dates.

While the comment "use 1M NaOH to regenerate GFO" is certainly novel in the reefkeeping world, it doesn't become very useful until we know how much 1M NaOH to use for how much GFO, and for how long to do it, right? And, if you only regenerate the GFO 50% or 75% of the way, that isn't very useful either, right? The best "recipe" is what we intended to find. And not just to remove some of the bound phosphate, but all of it. We determined that through testing, and it's in the article.

Did anyone in this thread determine how much sodium hydroxide it requires to *entirely* regenerate a known volume of exhausted GFO using authentic reef aquarium water? As in, they continued soaking in sodium hydroxide and testing for phosphate until no more phosphate was liberated? I honestly don't see any resolution of that point. That is what we did with, again, lots and lots of testing.

The article sure came across to me as if the author deduced this by himself, a la a wunder-kid.

You seem to be reading a lot into my motivations based on a few posts on RC and making a lot of incorrect assumptions in the process. For what it's worth, there ARE people claiming in this thread to have "come up" with GFO regeneration, which is demonstrably false.

However not giving anyone else attribution, credit, or just being honest with the reader and mentioning that you found the information online and duplicated it in testing, comes across to me as trying to take credit for the work of others.

There are references at the end of the article. I do regret not giving credit to William Wing for being the first person to mention to me that GFO can be regenerated with NaOH. He has helped us out tremendously in so many ways I can't thank him enough.

If you want to discuss this in person over a beer, and since you're in the area, I'd be happy to show you around my work and talk about it. I really just want to help people make their tanks work better.

 

[Matt_Wandell]

I will have to put in my 2 cents here. First, I agree with Gresh and Simon. However, some credit should have been given to jptenklooster, tatuvaaj, ScooterTDI and RC should have been sighted. When I first started to read the article the first thing that came to mine is where is tatuvaaj in it.

Thanks Boomer. We'll have to agree to disagree.

 

[Boomer]

You are welcome any time and you know that. Yes we can to agree to disagree. However, as most know me I'm real big on cited ref.. So, I'm forced to say this. So, do not take it wrong good friend. It would have been so easy to have said.."Personal communications RC Chem Forum memmbers."

 

[Matt_Wandell]

You are welcome any time and you know that. Yes we can to agree to disagree. However, as most know me I'm real big on cited ref.. So, I'm forced to say this. So, do not take it wrong good friend. It would have been so easy to have said.."Personal communications RC Chem Forum memmbers."

You're right, it would have been easy. And honestly at the time, I really felt like a "thanks to everyone in this thread" posted here was enough of a tip of the hat. I was certainly wrong about that, and I do regret not mentioning everybody who contributed to this discussion more officially.

 

[Boomer]

I do not care or what **anybody may add. That last post for me is by a Honorable Man

 

[SimonSKL]

I wish we would stop arguing whose credit it is to come up with the idea. Someone started the idea and we had lots of discussion in the thread. There were many pleas for someone who could summarize the discussion and do a write up. Matt took up the challenge and it benefits a lot of people and we thank him for that.

To me this is not a scientific paper for big time publishing but rather more like a cook book recipe. Do I really care who started the recipe? not really. Lets return to our topic, shall we?