Should I remove my protein skimmer on my established reef?

TwoFish

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#1
I have a 120gal acropora dominated tank in a Red Sea Reefer XL with stable parameters. My filtration is 4 filter media cups with polyfill, bag of carbon, 1’x1’ refugium section with red algae lit by a kessil, and appropriately rated protein skimmer. Nutrients are at 0ppm nitrates & 0.015ppm phosphate. Colors are great but I feel that they could be better.
Par ~ 250
Power heads- 2 mp40 & 1 mp10
Coral food - oyster feast nightly daily & arctic pods

I wanted to remove the skimmer and go the natural route by expanding and doubling my refugium section, and input before going forward goes a long way.
 

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#3
Before removing it completely I would try dialing it back to maybe 18 hours a day for a month and see how that goes.

Personally I think a better choice may be to increase the amount of food in the system and keep the skimmer running. If you toss in an automated feeding of something like an ammino acid or even a reef roids type product it might also help your corals to color up IME.

Lastly, and this has also worked for me, evelvating potassium a touch if you are running very strong lights can also help to increase color.

Good luck.
 
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#4
I would leave it on with the drain line open and draining back into the sump.

That way you keep the beneficial aeration and don't have to go through the hassle of taking it out and putting it back in should you decide you need it.


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TwoFish

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#5
Before removing it completely I would try dialing it back to maybe 18 hours a day for a month and see how that goes.

Personally I think a better choice may be to increase the amount of food in the system and keep the skimmer running. If you toss in an automated feeding of something like an ammino acid or even a reef roids type product it might also help your corals to color up IME.

Lastly, and this has also worked for me, evelvating potassium a touch if you are running very strong lights can also help to increase color.

Good luck.
Thanks, skimmer has always ran for 12 hours and turns off at night. Doser doses 2ml of acropower daily. In response, I think turning down the skimmer a few hours every month may be the best solution going forward if I were to plan on removing the skimmer entirely.
 
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#7
Thanks, skimmer has always ran for 12 hours and turns off at night. Doser doses 2ml of acropower daily. In response, I think turning down the skimmer a few hours every month may be the best solution going forward if I were to plan on removing the skimmer entirely.
I would dose more. On my 120 I dosed 8mL of 3 ammino's daily, fed frozen once daily, and had auto feeders feed 3x daily.

Dosing 2mL a day, really isn't much IMO

Corals really do have access to a large amount of food in the wild. Seems to help them color up some IME.
 
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#8
I was thinking of trying the same thing my self.
I pull out a 5g bucket full of cheato every month. I also never get a reading of nitrates and phosphates run about 0.06. I do use gfo to keep po4 lower. If I didn’t use gfo my po4 runs around the same as yours. But every few weeks I get a little bloom of red slime and dinos (when I say little I get a patch about 4” in the refuge). When I change the gfo out the patch goes away. But I know research has lead people to believe red slime and dinos blooms are caused by an imbalance in nitrates and phosphates.
Now here’s my dilemma I’m running a DC powered skimmer and it’s running at its lowest power setting. I’m not a fan of turning a skimmer on and offf. Here is why. So when you get a new skimmer we all agree most skimmer need a break in period. The break in period is when a bio film develops on the surfaces that touch water constantly, Right! So my thinking is if you run your skimmer on a timer and it turn off for a long enough time that the bio film dries out and dies off then is that truly breaking in a skimmer. Also having that bio film die off can’t be the greatest thing inside our closeloop systems. This is the reason I invested in a dc skimmer pump for my itech skimmer. A dc pump can give you the option of push more or less water through the body of the skimmer. Then with the air valve I can also control how much foam i can develop.
Now being that I am running my skimmer at the lowest setting and I’m still not getting nitrates to read in a Red Sea pro test kit. I’m really contemplating of turning off the skimmer for a week or two to see what happens. By turning off the skimmer I’d be hoping to see a bump in nitrates in the tank and hopefully have a balance in No3 & Po4. In turn hoping my colors pop a little more and not get any blooms in dinos or red slime.
 
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#9
I would dose more. On my 120 I dosed 8mL of 3 ammino's daily, fed frozen once daily, and had auto feeders feed 3x daily.

Dosing 2mL a day, really isn't much IMO

Corals really do have access to a large amount of food in the wild. Seems to help them color up some IME.
I do understand what your saying but look at it this way. So you feed more to make the water dirtier. Then let the skimmer pull the crap out. Yes your fish must love it. But what if you feed a little less (enough that the fish are happy and healthy) and there no skimmer to pull out all the crap. Instead the food stays in the water column for a longer period and then the corals have more time to feed and then is consumed by the macro algae in the fuge. Then is exported out when you clean out some off the algae. Wouldn’t you spend less on food and power to power the skimmer and still have the same results as the person that had no skimmer or an under rated skimmer.
Granted this may not work for everyone. Every tank is different and there are way to may variables in our systems. Like refuge, volume of water, pounds of live rock, live sand, and amount of corals and fish to produce waste.
But it’s proven that the bubble in a skimmer is not selective on what sticks to it. All proteins and organics will stick to the bubble some bad and some good.
I’m not saying one way is right or wrong. I’m just saying that sometimes concepts need to be challenged and so many will say that there way is write and other ways are wrong I’d just like people to think about both sides.
 

TwoFish

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#10
Lots of good discussion,
And my main reasoning is brought up here. I have 8 small fish that I feed twice daily (Spectra +) along with aminos, oyster feast, arctic pods, and frozen blood worms. I want to say that my feeding schedule makes sense b/c I feed the fish in the day and the corals at night (oyster and aminos) when the skimmer is off. Granted, I could dial up the aminos but I am worried of overdosing and cause RTN, however I will see with how the corals react every month and may increase by 2mL/day and limit my dose @ 10mL daily to avoid this issue. I do water changes weekly (10% Tropic Marin Pro), which replaces my trace elements. Other than feeding more, are there any other inputs on improving coral colors? I should mention my tank is stable at 8.6 dKH
 
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#11
I was thinking of trying the same thing my self.
I pull out a 5g bucket full of cheato every month. I also never get a reading of nitrates and phosphates run about 0.06. I do use gfo to keep po4 lower. If I didn’t use gfo my po4 runs around the same as yours. But every few weeks I get a little bloom of red slime and dinos (when I say little I get a patch about 4” in the refuge). When I change the gfo out the patch goes away. But I know research has lead people to believe red slime and dinos blooms are caused by an imbalance in nitrates and phosphates.
Now here’s my dilemma I’m running a DC powered skimmer and it’s running at its lowest power setting. I’m not a fan of turning a skimmer on and offf. Here is why. So when you get a new skimmer we all agree most skimmer need a break in period. The break in period is when a bio film develops on the surfaces that touch water constantly, Right! So my thinking is if you run your skimmer on a timer and it turn off for a long enough time that the bio film dries out and dies off then is that truly breaking in a skimmer. Also having that bio film die off can’t be the greatest thing inside our closeloop systems. This is the reason I invested in a dc skimmer pump for my itech skimmer. A dc pump can give you the option of push more or less water through the body of the skimmer. Then with the air valve I can also control how much foam i can develop.
Now being that I am running my skimmer at the lowest setting and I’m still not getting nitrates to read in a Red Sea pro test kit. I’m really contemplating of turning off the skimmer for a week or two to see what happens. By turning off the skimmer I’d be hoping to see a bump in nitrates in the tank and hopefully have a balance in No3 & Po4. In turn hoping my colors pop a little more and not get any blooms in dinos or red slime.
@Emac909 ; while it is true that the film does have a die off period. The time frame would be hard to know unless we know exactly which organisms are attaching to the side of the wall. And in the case of such high humidity environment of a sump it would be a long time before die off of the slime would occur. It’s exposure to air is constant with the pumps on or off so open air is not the issue but the humidity level. As long as he doesn’t take the skimmer out of the sump to dry up it should still be alive.

OP if you really want to remove the skimmer reduce the time slowly and feeding as well to see how your nutrients react. Don’t want to shock your coral with nutrient levels sky rocketing since you don’t know how much the skimmer has been affecting your nutrients. At least in my opinion it is to reduce skimmer then reduce feeding based on the test of your nutrient levels.


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TwoFish

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#12
@Emac909 ; while it is true that the film does have a die off period. The time frame would be hard to know unless we know exactly which organisms are attaching to the side of the wall. And in the case of such high humidity environment of a sump it would be a long time before die off of the slime would occur. It’s exposure to air is constant with the pumps on or off so open air is not the issue but the humidity level. As long as he doesn’t take the skimmer out of the sump to dry up it should still be alive.

OP if you really want to remove the skimmer reduce the time slowly and feeding as well to see how your nutrients react. Don’t want to shock your coral with nutrient levels sky rocketing since you don’t know how much the skimmer has been affecting your nutrients. At least in my opinion it is to reduce skimmer then reduce feeding based on the test of your nutrient levels.


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Yes, thank you. I absolutely agree, monitoring nutrients is going to be critical if I am changing anything in the system. Pulling the skimmer off slowly is going to mean that anything that has the potential to break down into nitrates WILL turn into nitrates. So we can expect to see a spike in nutrient values initially and as the algae in the refugium grows, these values will eventually plateau and stay consistent.
 
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#14
I do understand what your saying but look at it this way. So you feed more to make the water dirtier. Then let the skimmer pull the crap out. Yes your fish must love it. But what if you feed a little less (enough that the fish are happy and healthy) and there no skimmer to pull out all the crap. Instead the food stays in the water column for a longer period and then the corals have more time to feed and then is consumed by the macro algae in the fuge. Then is exported out when you clean out some off the algae. Wouldn’t you spend less on food and power to power the skimmer and still have the same results as the person that had no skimmer or an under rated skimmer.
Granted this may not work for everyone. Every tank is different and there are way to may variables in our systems. Like refuge, volume of water, pounds of live rock, live sand, and amount of corals and fish to produce waste.
But it’s proven that the bubble in a skimmer is not selective on what sticks to it. All proteins and organics will stick to the bubble some bad and some good.
I’m not saying one way is right or wrong. I’m just saying that sometimes concepts need to be challenged and so many will say that there way is write and other ways are wrong I’d just like people to think about both sides.
I actually tried the no skimmer route for a very long time. I found that I kept having to increase my refugium size to keep up with the nutrient load from the food.

I do think a large refugium is more effective at cleaning water, and the benefits from the micro fauna are huge, BUT, it got to a point of just being silly.

I had a 65g cryptic tank, a 34g cheato tank, and a 75g prolifera tank to run a 125g mixed reef. I was also still doing water changes.

With a protein skimmer and vodka dosing I can feed two times as much, and not do water changes.


I am not sure in the end if it is more frugal to have run algae instead of a skimmer. It might be, but it is also a lot more work IME, and I did it for many years.
 
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#15
Lots of good discussion,
And my main reasoning is brought up here. I have 8 small fish that I feed twice daily (Spectra +) along with aminos, oyster feast, arctic pods, and frozen blood worms. I want to say that my feeding schedule makes sense b/c I feed the fish in the day and the corals at night (oyster and aminos) when the skimmer is off. Granted, I could dial up the aminos but I am worried of overdosing and cause RTN, however I will see with how the corals react every month and may increase by 2mL/day and limit my dose @ 10mL daily to avoid this issue. I do water changes weekly (10% Tropic Marin Pro), which replaces my trace elements. Other than feeding more, are there any other inputs on improving coral colors? I should mention my tank is stable at 8.6 dKH
Doing a 10% weekly water change may be getting you by right now, but it is not enough to continue to keep corals healthy. You will have to test and dose to keep those levels consistent. Once the corals are consuming more than you are replenishing with your water changes you will have a problem.

IMO it is easier to just test and get a baseline for your tank, and then manage that baseline on the daily, then it is to try and maintain a tank with water changes.


Having those constant parameters will also help with your colors.

Good luck!
 

TwoFish

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#16
For the time being, heavy daily feedings is what keeps my nutrients in check but barely detectable on the Hanna checker po4 and nyos nitrates test. Some may say If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and this is somewhat true in the hobby. Rather than play mad scientist and risk putting my tank backwards 6 months anytime I change something, I think unless absolutely necessary, I will keep things as they are. As discussed before, the benefits of the skimmer are more than its absence, i.e. more oxygen, removal of waste quickly, and reliability.
 

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