Too strong skimmer?

[alvintran]

Like the title says, I'm asking if my skimmer is too strong. I've just bought a reef octopus bh2000 yesterday from craigslist, which is rated for 100 gallons on BRS. My tank is 29 gallons. So is it too powerful for my tank? What are some side effects if it is indeed too strong? And would zoas and mushrooms thrive in the clean, over-filtered water?

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[mike007]

Should be fine. Cleaner the water the better i say.

 

[alvintran]

Should be fine. Cleaner the water the better i say.

Great. Since I've been reading around, saying that too powerful skimmer may not be as efficient as skimmers rated for the tank volume. And I've heard that zoas and mushrooms thrive in 'dirty' water, so I don't know if my water is too clean.

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[Mrussell]

I run the same skimmer on my nanocube 24 and it works great. I only run the skimmer during the day because it is in my bedroom and is too loud at night. I would say just be careful if you have sps, my tank has turned ULNS when I wasn't keeping up on my feeding and my sps lost a bit of color. I have been running this system for about 2 years now.

 

[alvintran]

I run the same skimmer on my nanocube 24 and it works great. I only run the skimmer during the day because it is in my bedroom and is too loud at night. I would say just be careful if you have sps, my tank has turned ULNS when I wasn't keeping up on my feeding and my sps lost a bit of color. I have been running this system for about 2 years now.

Where is the noise coming from since mine is quite loud too. But its new so is still breaking in.
(What does ULNS mean)

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[NanaReefer]

I run the BH-1000 on my 26 So far my zoas are fine-but then again I'm feeding a lot more now then before the skimmer.


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[Reefing Madness]

Should be fine. Cleaner the water the better i say.

Agreed. No such thing as to much Skimming.

 

[j3st3r]

ULNS = ultra low nutrient system, also agree that there is no such thing as too much skimming, worst case is the skimmer won't produce much skimmate when the nutrients get real low, you can always run it for 12 - 14 hours a day if you think it's too big for your system.

 

[alvintran]

ULNS = ultra low nutrient system, also agree that there is no such thing as too much skimming, worst case is the skimmer won't produce much skimmate when the nutrients get real low, you can always run it for 12 - 14 hours a day if you think it's too big for your system.

:thumbup:

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[Dtech07]

Should be fine. Cleaner the water the better i say.

+1 water quality is key to whatever you growing.

 

[alvintran]

+1 water quality is key to whatever you growing.

I'm planning on staring with zoas and mushrooms. Then to frogspawn and hammer. Then to anemones and sps when tank is stable.

Also, do you think a skimmer like that can replace weekly water changes for a month? Since I'm going on a vacation in July, and I want the person who'll be looking after the house to do as least as possible to avoid mistakes.

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[Reefing Madness]

Every system is different, all would depend on your water parameters before hand, you would be able to answer that before we could. If you've got enough Live Rock and the skimmer, you may get away with it. But the other thing you would do would be to do all your maintenance the day before you left on vaca.

 

[alvintran]

Every system is different, all would depend on your water parameters before hand, you would be able to answer that before we could. If you've got enough Live Rock and the skimmer, you may get away with it. But the other thing you would do would be to do all your maintenance the day before you left on vaca.

Will do.

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[Mrussell]

You will be fine without water changes. Vacations are scary though, I swear my skimmer never malfunctions until I go on vacation. Make sure u have someone or something topping off the tank. If your water level gets low and the skimmer sucks in air the skimmer won't skim and u will come back to a very dirty tank, I know from first hand experience. As for water changes if you are doing them to lower ur nitrates I wouldn't worry about it at all, I didn't do a water change for the first nine months I ran my system. I do them once a month now and that is mainly to suck out kalk covered aptasia and Xenia. In comparison when I had a nc 12 with no skimmer I would have to do weekly water changes and still struggled with nitrate.

 

[alvintran]

You will be fine without water changes. Vacations are scary though, I swear my skimmer never malfunctions until I go on vacation. Make sure u have someone or something topping off the tank. If your water level gets low and the skimmer sucks in air the skimmer won't skim and u will come back to a very dirty tank, I know from first hand experience. As for water changes if you are doing them to lower ur nitrates I wouldn't worry about it at all, I didn't do a water change for the first nine months I ran my system. I do them once a month now and that is mainly to suck out kalk covered aptasia and Xenia. In comparison when I had a nc 12 with no skimmer I would have to do weekly water changes and still struggled with nitrate.

I'll definitely keep that in mind.

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[rhino56]

The main reason it's not good to have an oversized skimmer is that it wont produce enough skim to come over the neck if it's too big. I recently did a little experiment on my tank setup. I have been running a reef octo 160 diablo for a long time, I went ahead and tested running 2 of them. The result was that it was too much skimmer, neither produced any amount of skim to go up and over the top of the neck. I shut one down and the other started doing good again.
It is really about the neck size more than anything. So running a big skimmer on a small volume of water doesn't overclean the water, it has to wait until the water is dirty enough to produce enough waste to overcome the size of the neck.
Ideally a perfect setup for a tank would be 2 skimmers, one the right size and a smaller one. Once the big one stops pushing foam over the top due to the absence of dissolved organics the little one would kick on and it would be able to clean more. Or a magical skimmer would sense when it stops producing and tighten up the neck size. These don't exist yet but it would work great i bet.
So when choosing a skimmer look at the neck size and amount of water it skims to match your water volume and stocking level. 30 gallons total volume even heavily stocked would want a 60-100 gph pump, and no larger then about 3" neck size. Myself i would probably go with a 1.5 to 2"

 

[ionix]

To clarify, I assume you mean dirty water, as in water with lots of poop? If yes, then generally no.

But if you meant dirty water as in, nutrient rich water, then yes.

Though water with dosed nutritional additives would do better.

 

[darkblack]

You ll be fine.i can not overskim.