Zanthanum chloride

Looking to be other's experiences with zanthanum chloride treating of rock prior to placement into aquarium. Use if for precipitation of phosphate out of suspension.

Product used, commercial or aquarium specific.
Side effects.
Success.

 

Correction, 'Lanthanum' chloride.

 

Thanks Sponge, ordered SeaKlear this morning.

Dave, that was the exact problem I had. Do not have a sensitive phosphate tester but had issues when I put 3 month cycled marco rock in the tank. Couldn't keep algae at bay. Right now tank is being moved and all the rock is dried out again. Going to cycle it with LaCl.

 

So I went with the suggestions and used the SeaKlear Phosphate remover for pools.


I have roughly 100 ibs of rock separated by 3 - 35 gallon totes filled with rock, roughly 15 gallons of water and 3 oz of SeaKlear.


Procedure was to fill tub with water and Phosphate remover, then add the rock dry. My theory is that this will allow the solution to soak into the rock and work against the phosphate rather than the solution dilute into the wet rock. Roughly a minute after placing the first rock in each tote the water turned quite cloudy with visibility down to maybe an inch. Per other forum posts this cloudiness is the reaction of the Lanthanum Chloride reacting with the phosphate and the byproduct precipitating out. I would have to agree as the next morning the rocks has a white powdery coating on them. After 48 hours the solution was checked for phosphates and non where detected. This is probably futile as i tested a solution whose purposed is to remove phosphate... The rock was then removed and simply shaken in the solution to removed the precipitated byproduct.


The rock still had some green algae film from its previous set up so I filled the tubs with water again, added 2 cups bleach to each tote and restocked them with the rock. I did not rinse the rock with the intent that any residual lanthanum with continue to work on the rock if any bit of Phosphate was left. Most of the green film was non existent after a few hours though some lingering strands of hair algae managed to linger. Goal for this run was to get all the green off the rock but by way of schedule it turned into a 2 day soak.


Followed up with 2 batches of freshwater soaks to removed the bulk of the bleach and anything that might be in the SeaKlear solution. Now I'm going to rockscape the tank, fill with saltwater and boot the system up. Let the system cycle and test for phosphate, but most importantly watch for exceptionally fast algae growth on the rocks as all theories were derived prior to having a sensitive phosphate tester.