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Re: My tank can't get enough iron!



>I've been dosing my 90 gallon with Seachem's Flourish for about 3 weeks now.
>I have also been trying to monitor my tank's iron concentration since
>switching to Flourish instead of my PMDD style chelated trace mix.  Every
>day I added 5 ml of Flourish to my tank.  Roughly every other day to every
>third day, I've tested my iron concentration using a Seachem iron test kit.
>
>
>My test kit is showing that I have no iron.  I've continued to add 5 and
>lately 10 ml of Flourish to my tank every day and still have yet to measure
>any iron in my water.  I suspected my iron kit my have expired, but when
>measuring the reference sample included in the kit, it was right on.
>
>I've wondered about how quickly the iron could be taken up by the plants, so
>I've tried measuring the iron roughly 5 minutes of adding the Flourish to
>the water and various times up to about 30 minutes after adding it.  Last
>night I even added 15 mL to see if I would get some colour in the kit.
>Nothing...
>
>Any ideas???
>
>Is it precipitating out with my separate phosphate additions (approximately
>0.1 - 0.2 mg/L added each day, done at the same time roughly as the
>Flourish)?
>
>Should I keep on adding more every day until I see something?

Do you see any kind of hazy or cloudy precipitate when adding the 
Flourish It could be either iron carbonate or iron phosphate (a 
highly insoluble compound). So if you're adding the phosphate at the 
same time and in the same area this is a strong possibility. 
Utilization of ferrous gluconate (in Flourish) is rapid but it you 
should still see some after only half an hour, so I suspect something 
else is going on here. But what I would suggest is to use Flourish 
Iron to maintain iron levels, not Flourish. Flourish contains iron 
but most of the other components in Flourish won't be used at the 
same rate as iron will be, so if you use Flourish over and over to 
try and keep your iron level up you will end up adding too much of 
everything else. This is exactly the reason we came out with Flourish 
Iron, so that iron could be maintained independently of the other 
components.
-- 

Gregory Morin, Ph.D.  ~~~~~~~Research Director~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Seachem Laboratories, Inc.      www.seachem.com     888-SEACHEM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~