Anybody use POLYBIO Poly Filter?

[MattyM]

I just got my hands on one of these, but am wondering if it's a good idea in a planted tank? I know plants need some phosphates, but am also wondering if it would strip out other nutrients from fertilizers like Easy Green. Googling has provided mixed opinions, and I have not heard back from the company yet. 

Maybe Purigen would be a better water polisher and this would be better at stripping out medications and such. Just curious if anyone's had experience with it. 

[Jess]

Never heard of it!  

Their website says that "by means of a special proprietary process, it is made impervious to salt while being organic-loving to certain materials."  Not too sure how to make sense of that, but I think a lot of fertilizer ingredients exist as salts so this phrase would suggest it does not remove those.  In their FAQs, they say it will remove all meds, organic nitrogen compounds, amino acids, phosphates, tannins and humic acids, and related compounds (actually, they say it "sorbs" them but I don't know what that word means so I assume they intend to say that it "removes" or "absorbs" them).  Plants utilize a number of organic compounds though, not just the trace minerals that exist in fertilizers as salts.  So I personally would not use this in my planted tanks.  Then again, this product sounds very much like Purigen which I think people do use in their planted tanks.

I guess to me the question would be what are you trying to achieve?  Or what's not working in your tanks?  I don't like to use these types of products in my tanks because I can't predict how they might upset the balance...to me, those organic compounds are mostly serving a function in my tanks so as long as the fish and plants are reasonably happy I don't want to mess with that balance.

Then again, I keep fish from slow-moving blackwater streams, where there are a lot of organic compounds in their waters.  Maybe if you're trying to replicate a fast-moving brook or stream, something like this could help because I assume in those environments organic compounds exist at much lower levels.  You just gave me a thought - maybe this is what people mean when they say a fish needs to be kept in "pristine" waters (usually "pristine" is accompanied by "well-oxygenated").

Edited September 21, 2022 by Jess
grammar

[MattyM]

On 9/21/2022 at 12:12 PM, Jess said:

I guess to me the question would be what are you trying to achieve?

Cheers @Jess - thanks for the input. I accidentally OD'd ferts, leading to a huge algae bloom. I've been running a UV sterilizer the past week, and I gotta say - not only is the water getting super clear, but everything is thriving. Any sort of "bound" algae (fuzz/hair/etc) is down (which could be due to the plants exploding in growth), fish/shrimp are super active, I have fry, etc. Everything just seems more balanced and happy. Tank is fairly new still at 3 months, so it could just be starting to come into maturity, but I think the UV has def helped things. 

So basically I'm pondering ways to keep this going w/o having to run a UV. My tanks are small, and the UV unit is in the tank taking up space. I'd like to experiment with filter media in a HOB, and am exploring products to try. Currently I'm just running sponges, but I'm going to try a small HOB to help polish/clean a bit more. 

[eatyourpeas]

I rely on this for my SW tank, as it is using mostly chemical and mechanical filtration until I can get the right macros to grow.

I have only used it as an emergency organic remover when I know my plants can’t handle the load in my FW tank, and I can’t do a WC. I would not rely on it as a regular filtering regime.

[Jess]

Gotcha!  Hmm...welcome to the world of experimentation, haha!  One thing I have found is that definitely the best way to figure stuff out is to experiment for yourself.  I think in the aquarium hobby there's often no single "right answer" because it involves nature...there is adaptability (of all forms of life in the tank), a lot of incomplete inforamtion, plus just inherent stochasticity at work.  My 3 tanks range in size from 7.5 gallons to 45 gallons, and the smallest one is the most difficult one to maintain.  It also just has a sponge filter, and no bottom feeder fish, so it needs frequent water changes...but frequent water changes means variable water chemistry (so far, not enough to cause problems for most of my fish, but enough to cause a massive crypt melt about a year ago!)

A UV sterilizer accomplishes different goals from these water "purifying" things like Purigen.  It's mostly going to kill free-floating algae plus "bugs" that could harm your fish (like bacteria and viruses).  That's how it makes the water clearer, as far as I understand it (by killing free-floating things that increase turbidity).  But the things like Purigen will bind organic compounds from the water, making them unusable to plants, and they won't kill algae or bacteria/viruses.  So the two things are not interchangeable.

Most likely the best way to keep algae down will be to really dial in your fertilizers to keep the plant growth strong, avoid too long a duration of light, and keep your water changes steady (so, for smaller tanks I guess smaller, more frequent water changes are better).  You can also keep the UV sterilizer out most of the time and just run it once every couple of months for a few days or something like that.

[MattyM]

On 9/21/2022 at 1:13 PM, Jess said:

One thing I have found is that definitely the best way to figure stuff out is to experiment for yourself.

Well said! I totally agree and appreciate the input! 

ALSO - I got this very interesting email back from the company, where I mentioned Easy Green so they could look it up as a reference - holy explanation, though from what I've read all kinds of plants can absorb nutrients through the leaves 🤔 so I gotta question all this:  

Quote

The problem with this type of plant fertilizer is the mixture. Heavy metals: Magnesium, Iron, Manganese and Zinc cannot remain stable in the plastic bottle. If formulated for research or laboratory procedures the product would be sold in dark glass bottles filled with a 10% or stronger mineral acid. However, aquarium companies will not insure a consumer product containing 10% or greater mineral acid solution. Instead they use a chelation agent such as EDTA which keeps the metals in solution but makes them unavailable to aquarium plants or animals. FYI : aquarium plants are true plants and can only absorb nutrients through the root system not the stems or leaves. 
 
Even reef aquarium hobbyists are susceptible to smoke and mirrors myths when they purchase Marine Salts made with chelated trace metals or chelated metal supplements for coral enhancement. A.S.T.M. has a Standard for synthetic sea salt mixtures. Only one company manufactures a marine salt meeting those standards Marine Enterprises, Crystal Sea Bio Assay formula. We use this salt for all our marine applications!

So basically this product solution contains Nitrogen (most likely Nitrate NO3-) and Phosphate (PO4+) and Potassium (Potash) and chelated metals. If you use laterite clay gravel as an Iron supplement and add a few more fish the effect would be the same as adding this type of algal (aquarium plant) supplement. 
 
Poly-Filter (R) would adsorb the chelated heavy metals, phosphate and 30% of the nitrate being added to the aquarium. 
 
 
Poly-Bio-Marine, Inc.
O.E. Manufacturer of Liquid Filter
Systems and Filter Media
Est. 1976
Reading (Exeter Township ), PA 19606

 

[Jess]

Oh goodness...I wish manufacturers wouldn't attack other companies' products using incomplete information.

"If formulated for research or laboratory procedures the product would be sold in dark glass bottles filled with a 10% or stronger mineral acid. " : Yes, and it would be one specific acid in one specific bottle so you'd need a bunch of them AND it would be impossible to manage dosing without overdoing it and wreaking havoc. I don't understand why they're even making this point.  You can buy single or dual-mineral dry fertilizers that are more concentrated (e.g. potassium nitrate, KNO3) - in fact, I used to do this.  But again more concentrated means harder to work with, and some of these don't dissolve that well in water, etc.  Easy Green simplified my life so much.

 "Instead they use a chelation agent such as EDTA which keeps the metals in solution but makes them unavailable to aquarium plants or animals" : Yes, the purpose of a chelating ingredient is to bind to metal ions and keep them suspended in a liquid. But that doesn't mean they're unavailable to plants.  Plants need metals to be in a soluble form (ions) in order to uptake them...chelators help to "hold" the metal ions in a form that is specifically available to plants - otherwise, you can have situations where a metal ion binds to some other compound and precipitates out of the water (meaning: it goes out of the solution, becomes solid, and is not available to the plants).  So this doesn't make any sense to me.  [Also, side note - if the ferts in Easy Green or any other plant fertilizer were rendered unavailable to plants by chelators, then how in the heck would there be millions of tanks across the globe with fantastic, healthy plant growth using liquid fertilizers?]

"FYI : aquarium plants are true plants and can only absorb nutrients through the root system not the stems or leaves". : This is simply untrue.  I don't know what they mean by "true plants" (later they refer to algae as an aquarium plant...I just don't really know what they mean).  Some aquarium plants are true underwater species (e.g. Blyxa japonica, I think), but most plants are more like bog plants - in their natural habitats they grow partly emersed and partly submerged, depending on the height of the water, etc.  A lot of plants prefer to get their nutrients through the soil, but most can get nutrients through both their roots and their leaves (in fact, Cory just spoke about this in his Sunday livestream).  

I can't comment on the marine stuff - I never kept saltwater tanks.

"So basically this product solution contains Nitrogen (most likely Nitrate NO3-) and Phosphate (PO4+) and Potassium (Potash) and chelated metals. If you use laterite clay gravel as an Iron supplement and add a few more fish the effect would be the same as adding this type of algal (aquarium plant) supplement" : Well, firstly phosphate is not a cation, it's an anion (PO4 3-).  Secondly, it sounds like they're implying that Easy Green is the same as using laterite clay with a medium-high stocking density.  It's not.  The stocking density would mean more available nitrogen and phosphate for the fish.  Laterite is rich in iron (and also contains aluminum and manganese, from what I read).  The iron that's in it is ferric (Fe 3+), which in order to be used by plants needs to be converted to ferrous (Fe 2+) by organic acids in the water (and the efficiency by which it does that depends on the pH of the water).  The aluminum isn't used by the plants at all, and iron is rarely the limiting resource for plants anyway. Easy Green provides a bunch of other nutrients and trace minerals that plants need, that are not in laterite or fish poop or fish food.  Plus, Easy Green has been specifically formulated to make those nutrients available to plants in a wide range of water pH that aquarium owners may have.  Cory has also said he basically maximized the amount of ferts he could put in a liquid without it precipitating out at room temperature...trying to give us the most "bang for our buck" - he also talked about this last Sunday (and he has talked about how he created Easy Green in other videos).

"Poly-Filter (R) would adsorb the chelated heavy metals, phosphate and 30% of the nitrate being added to the aquarium." : They still can't manage to get the word "absorb" correctly despite an abundance of dictionaries available freely online.  How do they know their product will absorb exactly 30% of the nitrates?  And if it's absorbing the chelated metals, well there's your answer....you would not want to use it in a planted tank.

All this effort spent trashing another company's product that they don't know anything about...when they're replying to someone who wants to use Poly-Filter in his planted tank.  All they need to say is, "Poly-Filter will absorb all the nutrients that your plants need, so we don't recommend using it in a planted tank."  (I wish we had an eye roll emoji available here ha ha ha).

 

Sorry this is an insanely long reply.  That kind of inflamed me, LOL.  I think I'm right on all of this, but I know the Co-Op has some master horticultural people on staff (whatever the aquarium plant version of that is), so if they frequent the forums perhaps they'll chime in to correct me if I've gone wrong somewhere.  But yeah, given their reply I probably wouldn't use this in your tanks. ;-)

 

 

[MattyM]

@Jess I'm not sure what your background is, but I'm thoroughly impressed! I appreciate the time you put into that 🙏

[Jess]

Hahahahaha.  I'm just a nerd.

When I was a teenager, my dentist gave my family their 29-gallon because I loved it so much and they were tired of it.  I had no friends, so pretty much all I did all day every day was read and practice dance.  This was in the internet's infancy (relatively speaking), so I think I read every single entry of PlantedTank.net and a few other forums, multiple times, as well as every single library book on aquariums LOL!!!  I'm a scientist now (in genomics, kinda like a computational biologist I guess), but I probably should have chosen a career in aquaria.  I hope your tank keeps up its current trajectory of clear water and great plant growth!!!

[flyingcow]

Holy crap knowledge bombs up in here!

Don't plants chelate iron when they uptake it anyway?

Side note: adsorption and absorption are a little different. Adsorption is when something binds to a binding site on a porous material (like zeolite filter media, that's an adsorbent). Absorption is like sucking something up in a sponge where it is actually pulled in to the material.