What would Flourish Excel do in marine environment?

tinyfish

New member
In fresh water, Flourish Excel does a great job in limiting fibrous algae.

Would it be beneficial for that purpose in the marine environment?
 
Not sure in the marine environment, but I used excel on my brackish plants (1.016 ppm) and it kept green hair algae off my vallis and java fern, but still it still grew on rocks... I had a few pieces of driftwood that never had any green hair growth, but retained some green diatomaceous algae
 
I'm not sure exactly what's in that supplement. It says it's "organic carbon", which would indicate that it might act like vodka or vinegar dosing in a marine aquarium. So it might help reduce algal growth. I can't recommend dosing it, though, since I have no idea what's really in it.
 
I have a refugium with chaeto and a phos reactor and have just changed my light bulbs so I was trying to follow up on anything else that might help.

It seems odd that the ingredient would work in fresh water and not the marine environment. At least odd to me. I didn't know it was a poison. I was thinking it was doing something with the carbon.
 
It might be fine to use, but marine organisms can be very different from freshwater organisms, and I wouldn't trust it, personally.
 
It is used in hospitals to sanitize (i.e. - kill everything on) surfaces. When I did freshwater planted tanks I wouldn't even use excel. It's a carcinogen (glut. is, that is) - I wouldn't add anything to a tank under my care that I didn't research first - and when I found out what the active ingredient was - forget about it Dave!

There are quite a few threads on planted tank forums about this stuff. Tom Barr did some testing on it, and I was thinking of having a chemist friend with a mass spec run a few tests, but it never ended up happening. Tom will not mention the concentration - I think he's afraid Seachem would come after him if he did, but other aquarists get the exact same results with their freshwater tanks (less fibrous algas in their tanks) by running a generic, known concentration 2.5% solution of glutaraldehyde instead of fluorish excel. I hear it's some pretty toxic stuff at concentrations higher that 5% or so.
 
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