This question came to me and seems good for discussion:
SHOULD I USE A FILTER SOCK?
The answer is: it varies with the tank and with the thing you're keeping.
If you need hyper-clean water, say, for sps corals, it may help.
If you need slightly 'dirty' water for sps or softies, I wouldn't. The floating debris it eliminates is food for these guys.
If your aim is to keep pod-eaters like dragonets, I prefer not to have one. Pods can get through an Iwaki 100 pump, up 15 feet of hose, through the display and back down again a 15 foot fall to the sump, all quite unscathed. I have copepods and edible larger pods, little shrimps, all sorts of things happily growing in my fuge: the place is crawling with them---I have cheato growing under an ordinary CFL bulb (7.00 max at your local hardware) and a second deep sand bed, with live rock, and the place choked with cheato---flowthrough rate is very fast, incidentally---and I choose not to have a fabric sock. The fact is, a huge cheato ball that ALL water has to flow through acts like a filter sock, but the bennie is, it stops the detritus and lets it fall to the #2 sandbed, where crabs and worms have their go at it; and pods swarm in the weed. It's lush enough I can support both a mandarin and a scooter blenny (both dragonets, both obligate pod-eaters) in good health in a 54 gallon reef; plus I'm pretty sure my lps are not averse to copepod for dessert, either---they're huge, filling half the tank in sheer volume, and always in huge extension. So they, I'm sure, like both the 'dirty' water and the copepods.
My advice would be---if you need hyper-clean water, go one way. If you have a fish-only or an lps or softie tank, ask yourself if a weed-stuffed fuge as a must-flow-through-here wouldn't serve you better.
It's the same business with filters: I don't run one at all. If you have some varieties of very messy fish in a fish-only you may need one---if a sandbed and live rock can't keep up; but why go to the work if you can get by without? A stuffed fuge doesn't have to be cleaned or serviced...the critters eat the detritus, and produce more critters that feed the fish upstairs, and you don't have to work. What you do need is a semi-decent skimmer to keep the other kind of waste under control, but I find that that is pulling less and less as the corals get bigger---they must be sucking up some of what the skimmer used to get. (We're talking size of a basketball.)
Anyway---among all the things you need to spend scarce start-up money on, my money would go for a good sump and as big a fuge as you can swing, and you'll have a lot less maintenance and fuss, and leaving your tank in the care of a tanksitter will be very much safer.
My opinions. Not the only opinions. But it works for me.
SHOULD I USE A FILTER SOCK?
The answer is: it varies with the tank and with the thing you're keeping.
If you need hyper-clean water, say, for sps corals, it may help.
If you need slightly 'dirty' water for sps or softies, I wouldn't. The floating debris it eliminates is food for these guys.
If your aim is to keep pod-eaters like dragonets, I prefer not to have one. Pods can get through an Iwaki 100 pump, up 15 feet of hose, through the display and back down again a 15 foot fall to the sump, all quite unscathed. I have copepods and edible larger pods, little shrimps, all sorts of things happily growing in my fuge: the place is crawling with them---I have cheato growing under an ordinary CFL bulb (7.00 max at your local hardware) and a second deep sand bed, with live rock, and the place choked with cheato---flowthrough rate is very fast, incidentally---and I choose not to have a fabric sock. The fact is, a huge cheato ball that ALL water has to flow through acts like a filter sock, but the bennie is, it stops the detritus and lets it fall to the #2 sandbed, where crabs and worms have their go at it; and pods swarm in the weed. It's lush enough I can support both a mandarin and a scooter blenny (both dragonets, both obligate pod-eaters) in good health in a 54 gallon reef; plus I'm pretty sure my lps are not averse to copepod for dessert, either---they're huge, filling half the tank in sheer volume, and always in huge extension. So they, I'm sure, like both the 'dirty' water and the copepods.
My advice would be---if you need hyper-clean water, go one way. If you have a fish-only or an lps or softie tank, ask yourself if a weed-stuffed fuge as a must-flow-through-here wouldn't serve you better.
It's the same business with filters: I don't run one at all. If you have some varieties of very messy fish in a fish-only you may need one---if a sandbed and live rock can't keep up; but why go to the work if you can get by without? A stuffed fuge doesn't have to be cleaned or serviced...the critters eat the detritus, and produce more critters that feed the fish upstairs, and you don't have to work. What you do need is a semi-decent skimmer to keep the other kind of waste under control, but I find that that is pulling less and less as the corals get bigger---they must be sucking up some of what the skimmer used to get. (We're talking size of a basketball.)
Anyway---among all the things you need to spend scarce start-up money on, my money would go for a good sump and as big a fuge as you can swing, and you'll have a lot less maintenance and fuss, and leaving your tank in the care of a tanksitter will be very much safer.
My opinions. Not the only opinions. But it works for me.
