(upbeat digital music)
- Hi guys and girls.
I'm Reefman, and I wanna talk about how to regenerate
the polymer beads that you can use
to remove things like heavy metals, or organics,
or even your deionization beads,
you use in your water filters to treat your tap water.
So, I use CupriSorb in my tank because I have mystery tin,
and a tiny bit of copper,
and, since I haven't been able to figure out exactly
where those things are coming from,
instead, I am adding a little bit of CupriSorb
to my filter socks, in a little filter bag,
and that's kept it under control.
The issue is that CupriSorb, and Purigen,
and things like that, they get expensive over time.
So, instead of just throwing them away
when you have used them up,
you can regenerate them.
So we'll go ahead and do that for CupriSorb,
but the other ones are very, very similar.
So CupriSorb, it can remove copper,
that's the most normal use case,
it's in the name, Cup, copper.
It can remove copper, nickel, zinc, cobalt, cadmium,
manganese, and also tin and a bunch of other metals.
And so it's a really good thing to add to your tank
when you just have some heavy metal in your tank
and you don't know where it's coming from
or you just wanna remove it
or help mitigate it so that it doesn't damage your coral.
Once it changes color, and it'll get a little bit darker,
when it's used up,
once it changes color it's very easy to regenerate.
All you need to do, is get some muriatic acid,
hydrochloric acid.
You can get it at your local hardware store.
And you take that and some water and you mix it,
one part hydrochloric acid to three parts water,
and you let your CupriSorb soak.
Simple as that, let it soak for an hour,
then simply rinse the CupriSorb,
add some baking soda, sodium bicarbonate,
and that will neutralize any remaining acid.
Then you're ready to use it in your tank again.
Purigen is much the same way.
Purigen is a polymer bead
that will remove organics from your water.
You can regenerate Purigen using just plain old bleach.
You don't wanna get the kind of like splashless bleach,
or the bleach that smells like spring meadows,
or anything like that,
just get normal plain old unscented, run-of-the-mill bleach.
Mix it one to one with water,
add it to your Purigen,
and let it soak overnight.
In the morning you can rinse it out,
add some chlorine remover, things like Prime, or Safe,
or any other chlorine remover that you want.
Once you've rinsed it out well, add that,
if you can't smell any more bleach
or chlorine on the water, then you're good to go.
If you wanna be doubly safe, you can always use a copper,
not copper, a chlorine test kit, at the end,
just to make sure that you've actually removed
all of the bleach from that water.
The other thing that you can regenrate
which I really haven't seen much people doing,
I think this has gotten cheaper over time,
is the deionization beads that we use
in our RO/DI water filters,
that's the D-I, deionization, in it.
So these are two different kinds of beads.
There is a cation and an anion.
Since they are actually different chemicals
you'll need to regenerate them differently.
It's a little bit more complicated than
just mixing hydrochloric acid, like for CupriSorb,
or just using bleach with Purigen,
you actually need to use lye, and hydrochloric acid,
to regenerate both parts of the mixed bed.
Hopefully that was helpful.
I really do recommend regenerating these products.
It's kind of wasteful just to throw them away.
And you can get the materials, lye, and muriatic acid,
or hydrochloric acid, at your local stores.
Lye might be a little bit harder to get.
You can buy it online, but any soap making store,
or, (chuckles), I mean,
who has a soap making store next door?
But, if you do, they use it for soap.
You also use it to make pretzels, things like that,
there's a bunch of normal uses for these things,
so, don't think that people are gonna think
you're weird asking for lye in a store.
And then, muriatic acid,
you might find it in the pool supplies section
because it's used to acidify pools.
It's also used to remove scale off of concrete,
a whole bunch of different things that's used for as well.
So if this was interesting,
I hope that you are able to regenerate your polymer resins.
Remember that you can't do it too many times,
you're only gonna get so many regenerations out of it
before it's just not gonna work,
and you have to replace it.
Maybe, I don't know, five or six,
depends on exactly how aggressive you're doing it,
and how dirty your tank is.
But, yeah, good luck, see you next time.
Bye.