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Originally Posted by anglfish
I don't seem to have phosphate in my water. strangely. I got a test and tested the water 3 days ago and it was just at 0.25 ppm.
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test kits don't test organic phosphate, only inorganic, so it's useless to test for it. 0.25ppm of inorganic phosphate isn't a clear picture of what the organic phosphates are at. Organic phosphates are the nutrients used by algae, not inorganic. And even if you could test for organic phosphate, the algae could be eating it as fast as it's entering the water (fia feeding or liverock die off) to make testing for it difficult.
you can read up on it here:
http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-09/rhf/index.php
Water changes can only do so much for dealing with any nutrient problem. Even if the algae dies from changing some of the water, some of it's leftover to provide nutrients for yet another algae problem. It took a whole month to straighten out my tank's algae problem.