Problem with Recharging Purigen

A

alanbetiger

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So I thought I'd do some nice maintenance for the tank since I bought a nice new coral at the frag swap. I had 100ml of Purigen and it was starting to turn brown. I knew you can recharge it by bleaching and then dechlorinating so I thought I'd get ahead of the game and recharge it as a maintenance thing before it became completely exhausted. I only used 25% bleach and then dechlorinated it 8 separate times over a 48 hour period. After the second one I couldn't smell any bleach so thought I'd be okay. Within literally 5 minutes of placing it back in the tank every single coral was very very unhappy. Almost instantly, it scared the crap out of me! All the mouths of the acan, favia, frogspawn, torch, and chalice opened up 4-5 times the normal opening. I took it out and did a 50% water change, added 3 times the carbon and within 24 hours all of these were down to skeletons. Now 48 hours later 1 or 2 zooanthids are barely opening. The 2 ocellaris clowns and green star polyps are the only things that have survived without any problems.
So for a $12 purigen I lost about $500 worth of corals. Amazing. Things were going so good as well :) Good luck to anyone else who recharges the purigen but I will not be doing that in the future. I'm just glad the fish made it and that I don't have a 200 gallon tank.
 
did you lose the coral i got from you? i can frag half of it and give it back to you?

i would run some poly filter
 
I've recharged purigen dozens of times. With no problems. One thing I do differently, is I leave the bag out to dry completely before I add it back to the aquarium. Sorry about your troubles.

Brandon
 
Thanks for the offer Kuyatwo, your carbon came in very handy!! The cespitularia is sitting the fence in that it shrunk down to less then an inch long but hasn't melted away completely so might survive, we'll see. I'm not adding anything to the tank until after Christmas just to give it a rest, but then I might buy a little one off of you!
Yeah really I wasn't knocking Purigen or saying that this will happen to everyone. I'm well aware that accidents happen even if you try to follow instructions and I love the product, but I was wondering if anyone else had a similar problem. I might be the only one which would be great. Unfortunately I was freaking out and didn't do any testing at all so have no idea if it was a chlorine problem or pH problem or whatever. I know it says about buffering it for freshwater tanks which I will admit I didn't do. But for how comparatively cheap Purigen is I think I'll be buying more in the future.
 
Yup same thing happened to me but I threw it in before bed and woke up to death of all but one of my acans and other soft coral. I will never recharge again just can't seem to get all the bleach out even with Prime. 7 bucks cost me several hundred for sure. Just won't take the chance.
 
Let me know if you need a frag it has prob doubled in size already
 
When I clean the Purigen I soak it 24 to 48 hours... or until it's almost white again... in water with bleach, then 48 hours in RO water with Prime, then back to the tank. I do the same with all my filter socks...anything that is soaked in bleach gets soaked at least twice as long in Prime treated water.
 
Should have updated a while ago, turns out quite a few things survived the disaster. I left town for 2 weeks shortly after this thread started and thought I'd come back to a completely dead tank and was surprised to see some color when I got back. Basically half of everything survived. Half the zoanthids melted away but the ones that survived are doing great and have grown by 30%. Same with the acans. Torch went down to almost no attatchment to the calcified stalk and has since grown down about an inch and I need to frag it it's so big in my little tank. Frogspawn, trumpet and favia died. I was certain the chalice was a goner because it looked like only a white skeleton with literally no color but it is now back and over the past few weeks swelled up to normal and has another mouth starting to grow. I still can't seem to be able to kill the blue Cespitularia since it is growing like weeds again. The fish was good.
I think in the end it was a pH swing that did it and luckily the carbon and water changes corrected it quickly.
So though I won't recharge purigen again I guess the take home is that even though most of it looked dead they bounced back dramatically. So give any corals a good 3-4 weeks before you decide to throw out any assumed skeletons.
 
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