Phosphates =( & water help plz!

So after my weekend rountine maitenance of my tanks I decided to check my 90 gallon phosphates for the first time and as I expected the phosphates were off the chart and somewhere around 10 ppm which i was pretty sure was the cause of the outbreak in hair algae & brown algae. So what I've done thus far is do a water change, cut down on lighting period, cut down on feeding lowered the temp. a tad. What options do I have for taking care of the the phosphates besides a phosban reactor cause I know of that. I dont know if anyone has any other tips that could help. Also, i'm wondering if the water I use to top off my tanks could be the culprit for the phosphates issue. I normally use water refills that we get from stores such as Kroger's or walmart where u can refill the gallon/5 gallon jugs. So pretty much this is drinking water that goes through a process & i figured this is close to RO/DI water Does anyone have any insight into that?

 

I dont want to say because you said you dont want to hear it

Phospahte reactor

Ok i said it anyway - the only other decent way of removing phophates is a fuge. Good luck getting them down......

 

Call the water utility in your area and ask if they use polyphosphates or orthophosphates for corrosion control in their water distribution system. If they do the vending machines are probably contributing to your phosphates problem. RO by itself will not remove them, you need to follow up with good DI filtration to get it all.
Phosphates are weakly ionized so lower quality DI systems such as the small horizontal tubes are not very effective due to poor contact time caused by short circuiting or channelling of the media. A good DI is vertical and uses a bottom up flow pattern so all water and resin come into contact with each other.

You can still purchase water then pass it through the DI filter or bette ryet buy a good RO/DI which can be used for drinking water as well as reef use, solves two problems with one device.

 

If you don't want to spend the $50 bucks or so on the phosban reactor plus pump (which really is very handy to have, hint hint), you can always buy a phosphate sponge for use in your filter/sump. It is basically a sponge embedded with phosphate-absorbing material. This will initially be cheaper than a phosban reactor, but in the long-term will cost more.