What do you run your PH at ? Do you use calcium hydroxide ? If so do you have trouble with it clouding the tank ? I don't run GFO , just not a big fan of it and I have not had any detectable phosphate in a few months . I do run a sulfur denitrifier . I did run ozone for awhile but found my orp was getting out of control . It would stay at 500 with no ozone , I figure it was hypo bromide . I went a saw Joes tank a few years ago . Nice setup . Do you run GAC , I just started using it . My softies hate it . Have you used lanthium chloride ? Nasty stuff .
Hplc method for testing aquarium water
- Thread starter billwann
- Start date
pH stays around 8.1-8.2 if I remember right? Don't have the data at my fingertips. We do use calcium hydroxide, about 1/2 gallon of powder daily as a slurry with about 50 gallons of DI water. Doesn't cloud the water, but relatively speaking that is not much to add to our volume.
We have used lanthanum a few times but seen weird results with it. It definitely pulls the PO4 down though. We hope to take care of PO4 problems with GFO and regenerate it to cut costs.
No GAC on the tank yet, but should be soon. What issue do you see with the soft corals? How much do you run, what flow through rate, etc.?
We have used lanthanum a few times but seen weird results with it. It definitely pulls the PO4 down though. We hope to take care of PO4 problems with GFO and regenerate it to cut costs.
No GAC on the tank yet, but should be soon. What issue do you see with the soft corals? How much do you run, what flow through rate, etc.?
A lot of my softies just deteriorated in a few days . Iam just getting over that . I run about 10 pounds X 2 in bag filters with mesh bags with a flow rate of 55 GPM . I too saw weird reactions to the Lanthium in my last tank . I have found that the sulfur filter really eats the Po4s . I tried the vodka method and it sucked so I went back to my old sulfur filter . I have about 50 pounds of sulfur with a flow rate of 3 gpm . I feed my fish a lot , about 6 times a day , plus we have alot of meat eaters , puffers , lion fish and groupers . Not my first choice but the girlfriend keeps wanting them . Funny thing is I had great acro growth until I got the big puffer who decided to chew them all to hell . Do you run sand filters ? How do you like them ? What do you use for online monitoring of ph , orp and flow ?
I see you are running rk2 skimmers , How do you like them ? I have had a few of them over the years , a bit too power hungry for me now . I knew Bob very well , it sucks he died , great guy . How are the Schuran calcium reactors working for you ? Schuran makes the best ones out there if your willing to pay the price , what media are you using ?
I'm a chemist. HPLC really isn't the most useful tool for doing the types of water testing you are primarily interested in. It is good, for example, for separating a bunch of complex organic compounds from one another, so if you wanted to analyze sponge compounds, for example, it would be useful. The best way to analyze pH automatically is with a pH meter. You can also get specialized electrodes to measure some of the other ionic species you might want to monitor, but I would hope that any such automated system is only semi-automated, so that if one morning the device wrongly decided your pH is 3.5, it won't dump a huge dose of sodium hydroxide into your tank and killed everything.
Way before volcano skimmers , Scott used my idea . I built the first one back in 2006 , I run hplc every day , I should have been more specific , Ion chromatography is what I want to do . Ion specific electrodes pretty much suck , not what I would call very accurate and you could lot leave them running all the time like orp or Ph . I just have to calibrate my orp and PH once a week .
billwann":32hyntdt said:
I am not aware of application of HPLC for ionic concentration monitoring in seawater. You need to find a suitable resin or chromatographic column that can absorb or slow down the ions of interest (to separate them), and off the top of my head, I think it is not an easy property to find. I would be interested if you or anyone find anything interesting in this topic.
I am sure you did, but just in case, did you look into ISE and other electro-chemical techniques?
I have modified the rk2s quite a bit . There are a few thing that can be done to make them work better . The first thing is to reduce the turbulence in the skimmer body . the way that they have the injector blowing in is horrible . I have put diffuser plates in the larger one and that works well . If its a big enough one you can turn it into a giant needlewheel skimmer because the proportions of the body are good . Whats going wrong with your schurans ? how much pressure are you trying to get to them ? on a large tank like yours I would use a big fiberglass sand filter as the body and then add all the pumps and control's to that . One of the biggest problems with the larger schurans is they did not use enough bolts around the flanges so you get even torque on the flange and it will leak or just break the flange . A few years ago when I was building the equipment for my tank I would build custome skimmers and calcium reactors for large aquariums . It was a way for me to write off all of the materials and my CNC milling machine . How many and how big are your RK2s ? how many schurans do you have ?
billwann":rkhyz454 said:
6 Schurans, all are being replaced by a custom built reactor. To their credit, they were not designed for the type of application we have them in. They are on a closed loop with the dynamic pressure of the tank water above them. They leak at the flanges, and crack easily.
The RK2s are 600PE, we have two. I've looked into getting large Reeflo pumps to convert to needlewheel but it's a project a ways off for us.
One of the large reactors I built had a capacity of 300 gallons of media and was mounted on load cells so we could see each day how much media was being dissolved . Its a great way to tune a reactor to a given flow and PH . who is building it for you ? I will see if I can find any pictures of the ones i built .What are you going to do with the schurans ? I would be interested in buying one or two of them for my next tank .
When I ran lanthium I saw a a big decline in the growth of Coraline algae and pretty much all my SPS died with in a week . I started with a very small does and filtered through a fine micron filter to trap the bound PO4 . I know the corals see it just like calcium and try to use it but it made a total mess out of my tank .
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