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Titans_Reef
12/15/2015, 12:49 PM
So I regen my purigen for my 14g bio cube this past Friday. I followed the instructions like always and used regular bleach with a 1:1 ratio to start the regen process. After the 24 hour wait to let the bleach do its thing, I rinsed it out and soaked it in 60ml of Prime for 2 days since I got busy with work and didn't have time to keep working on it after the 8 hours. So after the 2 days soaking in prime, I rinsed it out in RO water again and added it to the media basket. Everything was fine on sunday, then after work on Monday the tank was cloudy and all the corals died. I did a water test and then had my LFS do the same which it seemed the tank cycled again since nitrates were at 80ppm. I did a WC a week prior which the test was 10ppm prior to the WC and 5ppm after. No fish died in the tank and all inverts and fish were moved to my 125g's fuge for temporary until the 14g is stable enough for inhabitants again. Any thoughts of why purigen, if it was purigen, would cycle a tank that has been set up after a year again?

jayball
12/15/2015, 04:06 PM
I am sure there are people that regen it successfully but if you do a search here for "purigen crash" (without quotes) it comes up with a few threads that reference issues immediately after. I am not sure if it applies in this situation as I am not reading through all of them.

Your nitrates are probably high due to all the coral rotting, depending on the amount you had in relation to the water volume.

Titans_Reef
12/17/2015, 12:04 PM
Yeah, I've regen purigen successfully before when I first set up the tank and then after for my friend who I sold the tank to. I tested my water yesterday and my ammonia was at 1ppm while nitrates went down because my LFS tested it at 80ppm and I took it down to 30ppm with the water change removing all the dead corals. I didn't have a lot of corals in there since its my frag tank, only live stock was couple of snails, hermits, crabs, and mollies.

zachts
12/17/2015, 07:34 PM
I have never had issues with it, used it for a long time in my 10 gallons in a hang on power filter, regenerated it many times, but never used the prime or any other conditioner, just rinsed in flowing RO for a day or so and dried it out after to make sure the bleach had all evaporated and rinsed it in flowing RO for an hour or two after. If I could still smell anything chemically I kept rinsing and drying until it was gone. I also followed with a gallon water change for the next couple days just for good measure (then went back to the next to no water change regimen of neglect I'd been on)
Never harmed any of my tank inhabitants, coral or anemones. Theoretically drying it in air loses some of the absorption but still worked much better than carbon.........

On the other hand if the purigen was providing the majority of the bio filtration due to a lack of other surface area or a heavy stocked tank, removing it may have been enough to cause an ammonia spike and cause the die off you say, or it may have simply been the residual chemicals as others have noted......