After thinking about it at work last night, and then sleeping on it today, I've decided how I am going to go about getting rid of my phosphate problem.
LaCl, or lanthinum chloride is a little complicated when it comes to adding it. Most people mix it with RODI and drip it slowly into a small micron bag. The La04P(lanthinum phosphate) gets mostly trapped in the bag, but it also precipitates out as La(CO3)3(lanthinum carbonate). Yep, it eats up your alk. Since my alk is low now already, we dont need to fight ourselves.
GFO scares me, kind of because it's pretty much iron oxide, or rust. Everyone else says to keep rust out, but they put GFO in. The other part is because of how aggressively it removes phosphates. It works, too good.
So, I've decided to remove phosphates with the fuge. Yea I know what you're saying, "Turtle your nitrates are already low, how are you going to lower phosphates with no nitrates? If you feed more you'll just be putting more phosphates in with the nitrates."
Well, I have KNO3(potassium nitrate) on hand, better known as Stump Remover. I got on the planted tank forum and used the calculator to figure out a concentrated solution to raise NO3. 4tbsp in 200ml of RODI gave me a concentrated solution that 1ml of will raise the nitrates of my estimated 100 gallons of water volume, by 0.5ppm. 4tbsp was about as much as I could get to disolve in 200ml of RODI... and I had to heat the water to get it to all disolve.
So what have I done. Well with NO3 at 1ppm, I dosed 2ml of KNO3 solution and turned the fuge light on for 18 hours a day. This should have put me at 2ppm NO3, and given the chaeto enough time and energy to soak up some PO4. I'll test nutrients every few days to make sure I'm heading in the right dirrection, and not going to bottom everything out.
