You can never skim to much .... I think not

[Eric Boerner]

That isnt a true statement at all.

Even huge systems will degrade relatively fast if something wasn't done to them.

Leave your 15000 gallon swimming pool without chlorine for a month and take a dive in it.

 

[marinelife]

the large volume I have is one reason I think I can go with out a skimmer, I also ran a 120 for 5 years with no skimmer so the volume is not 100% what is helping

 

[twon8]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7811737#post7811737 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Eric Boerner
That isnt a true statement at all.

Even huge systems will degrade relatively fast if something wasn't done to them.

Leave your 15000 gallon swimming pool without chlorine for a month and take a dive in it.

You missed my point. It's not the total size, but the amount without fish in it that is helping his system be stable sans skimmer
Take a 50 gallon display and add a 1000 gallon refuge, i bet it wouldnt' degrade quickly. its not that his system is so large, its that he has much more than half his system as a water holding tank/refuge,

this is not something most people can have, so they would be better off with a skimmer. I ran skimmerless for a while, but once i put a good one on, i would never go back.

 

[RichConley]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7811648#post7811648 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Eric Boerner
As many things in this hobby, there are always more than 1 way to skin the cat.

You have to look at Eric's point of refference when he wrote that Myth. Eric does not use a skimmer on his tanks. He has a full blown Berlin method with a very large refugium. There is no real need for a skimmer, since the whole tank is a dynamic ecosystem.

Look at Miracle mud idea. Leng states that he has ran his 600 gallon tank without a skimmer for 5 years, which he feeds 40+ large angel fish 4 times a day so they don't nip at his 100's of SPS colonies. This method doesn't use a skimmer, its all based on a refugium and bacterial filtration.

On the flip side, you can superskim your tank to a perfectly polished water column, but as most people know, you wide up putting a lot of the 'right things' back into the tank because you've pulled it all out.

Steve Tyree has an even different approach using multiple tidal zones to emulate natural filtration.

So, again, theres more than one way to skin a cat. Depending on what level of interaction you want to have with your tank to maintain, or how au'natural you want to go.

I think another thing to consider here is that many of these tanks have been running for years/decades. Tyree can do what he does because he has HUGE colonies of sponges and such that can process these things. If I was to try what he does, my tank would crash becaues it can't handle that. It just simply is not set up to handle that amount of load. For most of them, these tanks were running for years without SPS, and were allowed to develope huge stocks of nutrient absorbing sponges, etc. A lot of us can't do that now.

As far as SPS catching food/ only ingesting a small percentage of whats fed when you feed the fish, I disagree. Most of my feeding is frozen hikari/PE mysis, and I will basically just take a chunk and put it on the intake grill for a tunze or seio. The pump chops some of it up pretty good, and a couple of my acros will slime up and catch stuff. So, IMO, theyre eating a lot of the stuff I'm feeding the fish.

 

[marinelife]

If you start slow you can have the same system as they do, you just can not add as many fish right way and have to go slow or purchase steve's sponge kits

 

[Horace]

Frankly it comes down to I would rather have the freedom to add a large amount of fish...feed them like crazy to keep them healthy, have alot of "food" available for my corals via fish poop and left overs from feeding and not have to worry about raising nitrates/phosphates. Right now i am in the process of upgrading my first DIY skimmer to a much better design and better pump. Right now my nutrients are 0 nitrates and 0 phosphates measured with Salifert test kits. So why am I adding a better skimmer?? Because I want to feed more and add more fish... that simple. I also dont want to worry about my shallow sand bed getting saturated with nutrients.

As far as phyto...Never used it....my sps look fine to me . My buddy who has one of the finest tanks in the country also does not use Phyto. He just feeds different size pellet every day to all his tangs and Reef chili once a week or so.

 

[Eric Boerner]

My propigation system in So Cal was cut off from my main display tank. I started the system with a tri-zoned simular to what Steve was doing in his tanks. I ran my prop system without a skimmer for over 4 years without a single algae bloom and very little film algae. I contribute its success on occassional phytoplankton feedings and the 3 filtration sumps/refugiums. Total water volume was 150g + 30g +30g +25g. I produced over 100 frags a month in this system and had half a dozen fish in it, so it wasn't a lack of bioload.

 

[twon8]

i would say six fish in 235 gallons is a very low bioload

 

[Eric Boerner]

Im just saying, that one thing will work for one person and another may work for someone else. It doesn't require a 10 year old tank to go natural.

Im currently superskimming in my set up now, with phosban, low lighting routines, carbon, (no refugium... yet), and Im battling hair algae that came with a fresh batch of live rock that I got. After 4 weeks, its still giving me trouble. Im sure once I get the refugium going it will clear up.

 

[marinelife]

Interesting thought that just came to me, skimmers have been around a while but why is it that only in the past few years have we been able to keep SPS corals, really since the start of using live rock

 

[Horace]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7812238#post7812238 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by twon8
i would say six fish in 235 gallons is a very low bioload

I would say that six fish in 235g is EXTREMELY low bioload (unless those fish are 12" tangs)....I dont doubt for a second that you could maintain a system of that size with no skimmer if your fuge(s) are large enough (which they are).

I would like to see it with a heavily stocked tank though. I think your results might be different.

 

[marinelife]

My 180 has Purple Tang 5"(purchased 1/2000), Hippo Tang 11"(purchased 1995), White-faced Tang 5"(purchased 6/2002), Lamarks Angel 5"(Purchased 2/2004), Emperor Angel 11" (purchased 5/2003), 5 Green Chromis 1-3"(purchased 1/2001), 2 MandarinFish (male purchased 1/2006, female purchased 3/2004), Yellow Clown Goby (purchased 1/2006), 2 Red Scooter Blennies (purchased 8/2002) Male pasted away 1/2005, 2 6-line Wrasse (purchased 1/2006), Blue stripped Pipefish(2/2006)
The 300 has Hippo tang 6", Unknown Tang 8", Rabbitfish 7", Sixline Wrasse

 

[twon8]

yes skimmer have been around for a while, but today's are much better than those even 5 years ago; and i would say the main factor that has contributed to more people succesfully keeping acros is flow, though better lighting, live rock and a good skimmer def. help.

 

[Ti]

One of these days I'll shut off my skimmer and see what happens.

 

[oligotrophic]

imo, it's about Balance.

Switch off the skimmer and you need another way to remove/absorb nutrients. Operate the reef without a skimmer but with sufficient amount sponges, sea squirts, bivalves and other cryptic animals is one of the ways. One of the advantages of this, is that I get to see 'strange' larvae of these animals, especially within the cryptic zone where flow is almost zero. I'm can't quantify, but I suspect some of these larvae could be ingested by the stony corals.
The disadvantage is that it takes time to build the natural filtration capacity unless one acquires them from another provider.

With skimmers, it's mechanical removal thro' foam fractionization. In an earlier post someone mentioned Nitrates/Phosphates are not chemically removed, it makes some sense. But I'm not disregarding the skimming process, especially with a good skimmer, helps quite a lot in maintaining cleaner water, there's no doubt about this.

So it seems to me besides running strong skimming and combined with a fudge/refugium possibly helps the absorption side and ultimately -- nutrient reduction.

 

[RichConley]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7812370#post7812370 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by marinelife
Interesting thought that just came to me, skimmers have been around a while but why is it that only in the past few years have we been able to keep SPS corals, really since the start of using live rock

Good skimmers havent been commercially available for very long. I have skimmers that I wouldnt put on a 30g tank, that are rated for 250 gallons. 10 years ago, most skimmers really sucked.

 

[oligotrophic]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7811737#post7811737 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Eric Boerner
That isnt a true statement at all.

Even huge systems will degrade relatively fast if something wasn't done to them.

Leave your 15000 gallon swimming pool without chlorine for a month and take a dive in it.

Yep, totally agree, i've done that and dare not even take a dive in it with all that algae.......... feels kind of sick

 

[RichConley]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7814620#post7814620 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by oligotrophic


With skimmers, it's mechanical removal thro' foam fractionization. In an earlier post someone mentioned Nitrates/Phosphates are not chemically removed, it makes some sense. But I'm not disregarding the skimming process, especially with a good skimmer, helps quite a lot in maintaining cleaner water, there's no doubt about this.

Skimmers can't remove nitrates, but they can

1) Prevent them from every happening by breaking down things before they rot

2) Skim out things that consume nitrate, efectively removing the nitrate/phosphate

 

[RichConley]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7812444#post7812444 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Horace
I would say that six fish in 235g is EXTREMELY low bioload (unless those fish are 12" tangs)....I dont doubt for a second that you could maintain a system of that size with no skimmer if your fuge(s) are large enough (which they are).

I would like to see it with a heavily stocked tank though. I think your results might be different.

6 fish in 235? I've got more than that in my 58.

 

[oligotrophic]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7812370#post7812370 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by marinelife
Interesting thought that just came to me, skimmers have been around a while but why is it that only in the past few years have we been able to keep SPS corals, really since the start of using live rock

Lee Chin Eng, from that brief paragraph that described his work, I read he did this using live rock directly from the sea and natural sea water. If someone could point me to some online references to his work that would be interesting read.

In that sense, I think he was attempting to replicate a model of the real reef and that helped in the success. imo, for us, we are trying to mick the real reef inside our glass boxes -- limited life forms, limited water exchange (totally closed systems), limited food supply (consumers and producers). So we end up looking for ways such as heavy skimming, super skimming, over feeding, and what not. Think we are slowly getting there, but it takes time.