Will vinegar hurt my tank

[andy51632]

My skimmer was not producing any foam and I read to try some warm vinegar in the air intake while it is running. It worked great so I thought about doing it once a week. Will this hurt my tank?

 

[MYDRAAL]

Why not run it in a bucket with vinegar?

 

[ser_renely]

hmmm, interesting, does running it with vinegar work?

 

[markeo99]

it will throw off your parameters cause it is acidic

 

[Sk8r]

Watch your ph.
Try just disconnecting your skimmer and fill it with white vinegar instead of water in the kitchen sink. Let it stand overnight. It will clean it of awful gunk. Then rinse it a lot, and reinstall and you may not have to do that chore, if it is clean. What kind of skimmer is it?

 

[crvz]

A little bit of vinegar ever so often won't hurt anything, but I'd try to limit the amount if it's a consistent habit. You may be better of performing more frequent full maintenance on the skimmer instead. I don't often have to clean my air intake.

 

[padi200]

but don't some people mix their kalk with vinegar and put it in their tank?

 

[Sk8r]

Some: it forces more lime into solution. But kalk has a natural ph of 12, as I recall, so vinegar lowers it just a tad. Your tank has a ph of 7.9-8.3 and you don't want it lowered from that reading.

 

[Dave413]

I just run top off water through the air intake to clean the salt creep out.

 

[Sk8r]

I have an EV 120 Aqua C that I'd run a year. I did the full-up-with-vinegar thing and found colonies of fanworms and a quarter inch of bottom gunk, calcium deposits in many narrow spots: huge amount of gunk turned to goo overnight and skimmer efficiency improved 300%, no kidding. I also discovered and tightened some loose fittings/connectors to eliminate air leakage and that also helped.

 

[bach2pilot]

Why not just run some warm water through it?