I don’t think that a little phosphate in the sand has been proved to be bad, may be the opposite. I plan on using a small sample of this phosphate soaked sand for a couple of growth experiments, eventually.Dan whats your opinion on this data repeat pattern I'm seeing
tap water is supposed to be variable/high in phosphates and impurities
we have so many uncountable rip clean threads all using tap and I give you my word nobody has ever pm'd me or skewered the thread one time in all these years about us ruining their substrate with tap water...causing it to become fertilizer for plants that it wasn't before. rip cleans have about 90% rate testimony for helpful prevention of algae and sandbed matted invaders, a 10% neutral/no change/same frequency of invasion report, and a zero pct report rate of a tap water rinse on sandbed for 3 hours making things worse.
is it contact time? things added into a reef tank are sinked and staying, maybe three hours doesn't transmit much phosphate for the bind into the matrix?
perhaps we do give em a lil phosphate for the uptake but the actual impact of it changes, chemically along the way before plant or moneran mat uptake at a higher rate
perhaps we give them phosphate but the net benefit of ripping out all the leaking organic stores outweighs it
some detail of exposing sands to high phosphate water/ three hour increments on average isn't really amounting to much - impact. its all +