Phosguard and phosphate rx at one time?

[Hyde2406]

Can I use phosguard and phosphate rx at the same time? Just don't want to kill anything in my tank I'm running purigen and phosguard and just dosed phosphate rx my phosphates read 0.23 but I only half dose the rx should I pull the phosguard from the tank? I have an overrated skimmer and a 5 micron sock the kind they use for brewing or wine making. Please please help

 

[dankaqua]

I think your main concern should be in not lowering phosphates too quickly.

my phosphates read 0.23

That's not super high, so take it slow and try to lower it over time.

Phosguard is Alumina Oxide where as Phosphate Rx is likely Lanthanum Chloride (plus or minus some secret sauce) and Purigen is a "synthetic adsorptive resin". The first two will remove phosphates from your water column... but you may have a ready supply of phosphates in your live rock (see below).

Two threads you should read through:

Phosphate RX changed their formula/dosage

and

Phosphate Absorption Rates in Aragonite

This is from the above page (bold added):

Further compounding the difficulty in calculating the dosage is aragonite's ability to bind phosphate to its surface. R2R member JDA did some at home tests and observed that one pound of Florida aragonite rock absorbed up to 50 ppm of phosphate in 5 gallons of water. Yes, that's 50 ppm. No, I did not mean 0.050 ppm or 0.5 ppm. As soon as you dose LaCl3 and reduce free PO4 in the tank, your rock and sand could release more than enough phosphate to bring your PO4 levels right back to where they were before the dose.

 

[PerplexyHexy]

Dont use both at the same time... i used phosphate rx at night, wet skim and doubled up filter sock for a day or two to catch the solids in the water column... use half recommended dose and test po4 after 24 hrs...