Rudi wrote:ckauf73 wrote:When cleaning out your tank what do you do with all the nice stuff that is at the bottom of it.
Actually any number of things..
1. Drain the sludge into an open container, allow excess water to continue to drain via a small drain (ie.. oil pan), then you can dispose of the solid matter in the back yard etc..
2. I personally find that most of the materials are quite benign, and make an excellent fertilizer.. especially where I am having problems growing grass (I am terra-forming my back 23 acres... ) so I use it along side the road or in areas that are lacking vegetation.
3. The liquid itself (although by using TSP - you only need to drain the sludge occassionally, the fluid can remain) if you must drain the tank can be safely applied to your lawn etc. as a fertilizer. Just don't drain it anywhere near your trout or Koi pond...
Disposing of it in this manner may have some tree huggers up in arms, but true environmentalists understand that phosphates are naturally occuring.. and do not present any danger to the enviornment except in humongous doses such as when heavy industry produces it as a byproduct or municipalities dump raw sewage into Lake Erie and Lake Ontario providing the famous soap foam crown to the Great Lakes back in the 60's.
Also, if one is concerned about phosphates and JUST DOESN'T FEEL COMFORTABLE - then Savogran provides a
Phosphate Free Tri-Sodium Phosphate ????, and is available in places such as the entire State of New York -- Right Cecil
Oh and surprisingly the
Phosphate Free Tri-Sodium Phosphate, works almost as well as the real stuff which I learned at CubFest Northeast 2006
Rudi,
I may be the forum's resident tree-hugger, I suppose, but I agree with you whole-heartedly.
It is far wiser to use this as a fertilizer (It's pretty darn hard to get too much phosphate into your garden), than to dump it into your local sewerage system.
Sewerage treatment centers seem to (inexplicably) have a hard time getting rid of phosphates in their water. Ferric Phospate (the logical leftover of all of this, although I'm no chemical engineer) and excessive TSP precipitate, are both innocuous enough substances.
We spend a fortune on things like rock phosphate, and bone meal, when things like this we tend to want to flush down the sewer. I also feel the same about the efflux from dishwashers. Don't be foolish....make good use of the stuff, and dump it on your gardens......Unless you have a high likelihood of excessive runoff to wetlands or streams, no harm will be done.
Ferric phosphate would also provide your garden with a bit of Iron, one of the micronutrients that is often lacking, despite the fact that our planet is composed of 2/3 iron. Too much sodium can be a problem, but, TSP will not remain as TSP very long in the garden.....it will break-down, with the first rains into more stable salts. The sodium will bind with much more attractive elements and free radicals, like chlorine, and it will likely leach out of your soil as salt.
If you did stuff like this, and pumped your dishwater efflux out onto your garden, you would find that your overall need for phosphate fertilizer would gradually reduce over time, and having phosphate-rich soil...not just the top 3 inches that a top-dressing provides, is a very valuable thing.
The dangers of phosphates really comes from the fact that it encourages the bloom of water-flora to increase....sometimes dramatically and almost overnight, suffocating the fish.....water plants, and algae can increase so quickly, that at night, when they use oxygen instead of produce it, they can deplete a pond or slow-running stream of its oxygen rather rapidly.
Overall, given enough time, the problem always balances back out, but it is this rapid growth, from phosphate fertilization, that causes the initial problem, and the fish kills. The same thing happens when a big rain happens after a farmer top-dresses.....local streams get full of all of the nutrients, and the blooms get out of control. You may have noticed how "green" the ponds looked here in the northeast early this summer, when we had all that rain in early July. It was largely caused by fertilizer runoff.....no permanent damage was done......and the corn grew taller than ever......
An experiment into the quality of the precipitate as a phosphate fertilizer would be to use it on a rosebush.......one of the heaviest phosphate-feeders I can think of. Check the results and use it accordingly.......