What does a phosphate reactor do?

What is the point of a phosphate reactor? Will just sticking a ferrous oxide material (phosban) in a HOT filter have any adverse effects (such as decrease in efficiency, ect)?

thanks again 3reef members!

 

Works pretty much the same way, in my opinion!

 

yes it will, the material needs to tumble, if not, it will turn into a brick and be useless. even in a high flow area such as the sump when the material is in a filter bag, it turns into a brick and is useless. needs to be in a contained area with high flow to create a tumble, then it works great.

 

Yes and no! Depending on the material you are planning to use. If you use round, tiny granular media that assure constant water flow you can easily use canister filter. PhosGuard is designed to be placed in canister filters. The principle of PhosGuard is simple: efficiency = (volume of medium) x *1/(water flow). The slower the water flow, the better. It's advertised to use less than 100gph flow to treat 75-100gal tank with approx 1.1lbs of PhosGuard! You can imagine that if you are running 150 or 220 gal tank, you need to:
1. use larger canister filter
2. use more medium
3. create optimal flow in the filter!
It becomes rather difficult with medium like PhosGuard. This is why, there are lots of fancy (canister filter like) phos-reactors that allow more accurate flow control + can be filled with different media: like ferric oxide that easily treats large tanks! Summing, up: to perform optimal treatment search for the product that matches your current phosphate conentration, tank volume + size and flow of your filter!

 

I use this in one of these and it works great.

 

what is the easiest way to tell if you have enough water flowing through the reactor to keep the media from cementing?

 

In my opinion as well...8)

 

The media will "dance"...well, that's how Tangster described it to me anyhow As long as you see the media in the reactor moving around, you should have enough flow.

 

ty for the response ami.. one more question should all of it move or just the top layer???

 

I'm of the opinion that all of it should move a little but the top layer should move the most. Nothing crazy though. Just a little rolling of the media at the surface.