have you noticed any improvements? I am thinking of adding a phosban reactor to my solana
Go for it. From all I have read there are lots of benefits to running rowaphos, particularly in a reactor. My plan was to try and take the reactor out of the setup and keep things as simple as possible by using the overflow water to agitate the rowaphos as it passed through. The majority of the media just became compacted, and that reduced its efficacy. It was still good though. For a week all my corals looked healthier.
I was feeling so good about the tank that I decided to treat myself to an MP10.
I rig it up and suddenly a load of crap starts coming out of the live rock. Now this rock is old, and I have been blasting it with a turkey baster regularly, so all this detritus was quite a shock. In response, I open up the skimmer, change the floss, change the carbon, change the rowaphos, and use a sponge on the mp10 intake. I also do a couple of water changes.
Then I leave for a weekend away in the mountains.
Upon returning home I find a reef angel dead and pressed against the mp10, a couple of LPS colonies whited out, and about 1/3 of the SPS bleached. I also had a HUGE amount of brown hair algae in the tank. The back wall was basically a waving carpet. So I scrape away, siphon, water change, and repeat.
Once Rowaphos is saturated it doesn't leach, but overdosing it can have an effect on the PH levels. Aware of this [and monitoring the PH] I decided to use the rest of the 100g tub. There is probably around 70g or so now in a bag in my tank. Obviously, this is too much for the overflow, so it is in on an egg crate shelf in the first chamber.
I still have some HA. However, the PH has remained stable, and the SPS are starting to color up. I think I am winning the battle.
The overflow method is probably fine when things are stable as you can only use a small amount of rowaphos this way.
I am confident that it was not the introduction or saturation of the rowaphos that caused the crash. My guess is that it was the detritus that caused an infection on the angel, and it's death cause the crash. I can't be certain of that though.
I have a love/hate relationship with reactors. I might try another reactor, or even a canister filter. I am really loathed to add another pump and more equipment to the tank though. I am going to look into using the return pump to run dual reactors.
