One thing you will learn if you spend enough time in this hobby is how advanced and data driven Europeans are when it comes to this hobby.
While you sadly see people speculating and undermining the importance of scientific or data driven decisions in the hobby in USA, Europeans are conservative and more literature driven..
I take European literature and translate into English to learn and boy how much I have learned from there..
Just yesterday am following a thread where they are asking the op to stop their skimmer and over feed to treat dino which is crazy to me...while when I dealt with dino, I did not treat until I knew 100% of was dino through microscope examination and some home remedies examinations, then the only product that truly worked for me without crazy changes was a product I imported from germany. Otherwise many of what is called dino now is cyano (there is brown cyano) or diatom which only need patience, lower nutrients(when you have cyano spread some times your po4 test will come zero but my understanding it's not really zero..so I treat it with some rowphose to bring down nutrients for couple of day then I test po4..usually I start seeing po4 climes which means cyano is decreasing..
Now days here in USA every brown looking thing is called dino. No longer people wait out diatom phases or distinguish algae from protozoan from zooxanthellae... dino is actually type of zooxanthellae which is the same that make up your coral. If you understand that fact, you can address dino better. Better yet, you should know how to truly identify dino from cyano from diatom.
I have done a write up in the past with microscope pictures to help people distinguish dino from cyano from diatom you can go look it up. The key to fix any problem is understanding its rootcause and its details..forums are full with darts in the dark and expermintayions based on something someone have heard from someone else.....sigh.
Ther are couple of people I follow in this hobby from US like randy holmes and couple oothers. One feature you see in ligit people is they never enforce company or a product. Once you feel bias toward a company or product you should look carefully in to the review or suggestion...
Most of the common gfo leach Al because it's all Al based that's how they bind po4 to the media then this media start leaching back al and even po4 once it reach capacity.
Rowphos is not.
Bit of a rant here
