Ozone

Killjoy · Dec 29, 2014

So this may be a silly question, but I just can't seem to wrap my head around this.
First off I'm a little old school went it comes to reefing , so that could be part of my issue . Here's my question.
When it comes to ozone is there a benefit to using an ozone reactor vs. running it just on your skimmer vs. running it directly into your system or vs. using the ozone bulb in place of your uv sterilizer.

Now I have ran ozone in my skimmer before which flowed back into the sump and the system. I've ran ozone bulbs inside uv sterilizer housings, which also ran freely into the system. Now on booth systems I had carbon somewhere in there , just never in front of where the ozone water was pouring back into the system. So there was alway some sort of free flowing ozone in the main system, which I thought you wanted in order to help kill unwanted parasites etc.
Now I see all these ozone reactors with big carbon filters on them before leading back into the system. Which to me kind of defeats the purpose of the ozone because when it hits the carbon it's no longer. So is there a real benefit or reasoning behind this vs. The way alot of used to run ozone.
And what would you say is a good range would be of free flowing ozone in a system would be. ( orp meter. 100, 200,etc.)

*** and yes I know too much ozone in your home can cause health issues, hence carbon filters I get that. I'm talking strictly the aquarium system.

Cory · Dec 29, 2014

The purpose of carbon is to remove ozone from the water before it enters the aquarium. Ozone can damage other things besides bacteria in the water, like fish gills and coral tissues, carbon Prevents this. Any ozone left running outside of a chamber is asking for a loss of control. Ozone that leaves the reactor probably gets consumed by organic compounds.

Randy Holmes-Farley · Dec 29, 2014

Yes, the three big benefits of an ozone reactor are you can sometimes pressurize the reactor to add more ozone, the contact time is often a lot longer than in a skimmer, and the highly oxidizing and toxic products cannot get into the main tank.

I have several articles detailing these effects in the sticky link at the top of the Chemistry Forum. Go to Randy's articles and scroll down to ozone for much more detailed explanations.