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sources of phosphate?

2K views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  observant_imp 
#1 ·
I always have a phosphate problem (I'm a heavy handed feeder for my fish), but seem to be having much more trouble in one of my tanks than the other 2. The tank in question only has a few fish in it. I know I need to add a few more fish (to eat the food), reduce feeding, and probably increase water changes (although nitrates, etc. are low). But I'm wondering if I could be picking up extra phosphate from somewhere else. I use RO water so the phosphates aren't coming in that way (water was tested just to be sure).

Any ideas? Or suggestions on plants that really suck it up--I do have one tank where I barely have phosphate and another with high (but not off the chart) levels.
 
#3 ·
substrate is 50-50 gravel and fluroite.

using RO right to build the water back up.

What's interesting to me, is the tanks with the lowest and highest phosphate reading are virtually identical--same size, filtration, substrate, and lighting. I do have different plants and rocks in the 2 tanks and the one with the high phosphates only has a couple of rams in it so far compared to a couple of small schools of fish in the other. The tank with high phosphate has amazon swords, e tennellus, star grass and water sprite. The rocks are either that tufa rock or lava rock (I've had them in storage for a while--I think lava rock--I seem to remember the tufa rock being more gray). The low phosphate tank has a variety of stem plants and 2 large rocks that I think are primarily quartz (but don't know for sure).

I'm confident that at least part of the problem comes from the smaller number of fish which makes it too easy to overfeed. I'm just wanting to make sure I'm not overlooking some other source of phosphate that I'm not aware of.
 
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