So ive had my 120 Reef tank running for about a year now with a ASM G2 skimmer. It seems to do well as far as pulling crap out of the water. It fills up every 2 to 3 days. My tank is 120 gallons with about a 30 gallons in my sump. I have a pretty well stocked tank with lots of fish and corals. I cant ever seem to keep my Nitrates down. I do 20% to 30% water changes every 2 to 3 weeks. I also have been running Bio-Plastics for about 4 months now with little effect. I did remove a couple of my bigger fish to help. So the question of the day is will upgrading my skimmer help with with my over all problem? Will I get more crap out of my tank then I am getting from G2?
Is it time to upgrade Skimmer? Nitrate help
- Thread starter benibarra23
- Start date
I havent tried Vodka dosing, I figured I would try Bioplastics first and see if it helped. It helped a little but not enough, I am also starting to get some Cyano in my tank. Not a lot but I had never had it before, its easily being removed right now. With my work schedule I cant do water changes every week. Every 2 weeks is the most I can do. Will vodka dosing help more then bioplastics? Will I get better results from a bigger or better skimmer? My G2 is pulling out some nasty stuff so I know its working.
you can upgrade, but you will strip the water more... i'd try to find out where the nitrates are coming from... maybe over feeding, the food, you need more waterchanges, add some more macro algaes, maybe xenia, maybe a couple of them trees... what are they called... mangroves... stuff like that works... before spending a ton of cash upgrading a skimmer... then the break in period... ugh...
i wouldn't be too concerned about live rock... the number of pounds has proven to be a myth... or there are ways of getting away with a small amount of rocks using more water flow... the more the water flows through the live rock, the better...
so flow might work in helping reduce nitrate as well... but vodka is a good choice to start too... cheap and simple... i dose vinegar... kind of dose the same thing, but i'm still throwback and use kalkwasser for calcium...
so flow might work in helping reduce nitrate as well... but vodka is a good choice to start too... cheap and simple... i dose vinegar... kind of dose the same thing, but i'm still throwback and use kalkwasser for calcium...
When there are signs of cyano it means you have a bacterial imbalance. From experience running pellets, you need to dose bacteria weekly with a maintanance dose. The pellets feed bacteria which in return breaks down organic matter faster. Bacteria strains will out compete others and we find ourselves without bacterial diversity to do the job needed. I have shared this method with others and so far so good. To find balance again I recommend doing water changes in the morning before the lights come on. Cyano is unseen when the lights go off because it takes a different form and returns back into your water column. Then you need to dose Microbacter 7 once a week to keep your bacteria diversity healthy. An important step for me is using the Zeovit Coral Snow. It is designed to bind with the additional bacteria blooms developed by running pellets and allows them to be skimmed out with more efficiency thus preventing future imbalances. I went on vacation for 2 weeks 3 months back and came back to a tank completely covered in cyano. My reactor's output was too high and with this method it was gone with 3 water changes in ten days.
