UV sterilizer

[Siu]

I have a 180G reef tank with 2 Iwaki MD-40RXT water pumps. I recently bought a Aqua Classic 57 Watt UV sterilizer with 3/4" inlet and outlet. I study the user manual and find that if I connect one of the pump to the UV sterilizer, UV will destroy the planktonic food supply for the reef as the maximum water flow will only be 1344 GPH. If I connect both of the pumps to the UV sterilizer, I wonder if 3/4" inlet and outlet can handle the total water flow for the two pumps.
Please kindly help to give advice on this issue as soon as possible as my old one damaged two weeks before. Thanks a lot.

 

[brandon429]

easy

the plankton doesn't matter or we wouldn't have to feed, so your whole tank will be low in it anyway regardless. Use UV or not, the plankton doesn't matter. if it did, we wouldn't have to feed. If I had a large UV, I sure would use it. why waste $$. a hundred thousand successful reef tanks use, and not use, UV.

 

[stunreefer Verified Sponsor]

I would run one pump to the U/V. As Brandon mentioned I'm not a big believer that a high amount of "good things" are lost to U/V in our little closed systems. I run the same U/V on a ~70 gal system with even slower flow with great success.

3/4" inlet/outlet would kill your flow from both pumps as you figured.

Make sure to mount the unit properly to keep the chamber fully filled (noted in manual).

 

[brandon429]

there will never be a consensus on UV use, or which salt brand to use etc. But that being said, I love them. Ive used UV to fix a thousand wrecked tanks (pelagic invaders specifically) so using one preventatively is not harm. That might have been the fix you needed two years from now. Its ideal to build a tank that doesn't need them, but everyone tries for that. if you already have one, use it, I would. Id never have a large tank without one in fact, because after correcting a thousand wrecked tanks I want all the fixes running on mine and large tanks have access problems to the system vs tiny tanks we can easily take apart to address.

 

[stunreefer Verified Sponsor]

I also look at them as an insurance policy for my fishes. It's a no-brainer for me

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

I do not want one on my system, as I drive bacteria growth with organic carbon dosing, and I want those bacteria to stay alive until skimmed out or eaten by a filter feeder.

I do not want a UV killing them and undoing the reason for organic carbon dosing.

 

[jetmaker]

I've run uv for yrs and I wouldn't be without it

 

[Ryengoth]

I have a small SunSun stick-on. I will run it in the middle chamber of the sump if I am having major algae issues, like right now. It helps to kill the floating fibers that can restart the growth. The bio-pellets should maintain enough bacteria to keep the cycle going as small as the lamp is in it. I would never run a huge UV lamp on my tank. A Hg lamp is one of the strongest oxidizers you can handle and will oxidize everything organic that come close to it.

 

[brandon429]

hey what is Hg hadn't seen that abbrev yet.

Agreed on Randy's tank setup that precludes, ive also read of some NPS systems that drip live phyto, another preclusion. its at least handy to know if your setup isn't specifically using live plankton as a swing vote or pelagic bacteria as exports not many other tank combos would preclude their use or show as any negative (and this starts UV thread number 10,455 lol)

 

[cmcoker]

Hg is mercury..

 

[Ryengoth]

hey what is Hg hadn't seen that abbrev yet.

Agreed on Randy's tank setup that precludes, ive also read of some NPS systems that drip live phyto, another preclusion. its at least handy to know if your setup isn't specifically using live plankton as a swing vote or pelagic bacteria as exports not many other tank combos would preclude their use or show as any negative (and this starts UV thread number 10,455 lol)

Hg is the element abbreviation for mercury. All short wave UV lamps are mercury arc lamps and very bad for your eyes and skin. Some long wave UV are mercury but more and more are now deep blue LED. Shortwave is around 295nm and is what is used in all sterilizer lamps.

 

[Lenny_S]

I'm not sure if this helps, but I had a recent experience with my tank and UV seems to have saved my bacon. I tried carbon dosing for the first time, maybe I screwed it up, but I ended up with a massive bacteria bloom in my DT. It persisted for 10 days even after I completely stopped dosing carbon. Nitrates and phosphates were both zero the whole 10 days as well. It just wasn't adding up to me why it persisted for so long when the organic carbon, nitrate, and phosphate were all seemingly out of my system, but it did.
I added a smallish (18 watt) UV sterilizer after trying several other things to no avail. Within 24 hours the tank was almost completely clear. Here is the thread on that little adventure.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/help-me-decide-if-i-let-it-be-or-take-action.229037/
I don't know the long term effects yet, like I said, this just happened. But it was immediately evident that the UV sterilizer cleared the bacteria bloom.
I don't build these things, nor am I any kind of micro-biologist, but I did do a lot of research. From what I understand of that research, UV does not actually kill anything. What it does do is damage the chromosomes of unicellular organisms (and apparently the larval or cyst stage of parasites) to the point that they can no longer reproduce. They will live out their remaining days (or actually hours in many cases) doing what they do, but they will not reproduce in any way. So it will effectively stop or prevent a population explosion of free floating micro organisms that pass through the unit. Depending on the size of the unit and the rate of flow it will only effect certain types of organisms. Parasites require the lowest flow rate/longest exposure, then comes algae, then finally bacteria which is sterilized at the highest flow rate.
So I bought one, I used it, it's mine now. I'll let it run 24x7 until I see a reason not to. Might as well, I paid for it. I can say from my personal experience with a problem, that it helped tremendously. But I can also say had I not needed to get one, I probably never would have because I've just never needed one before.
If you have one, and you own it now, you might as well use it IMHO.

 

[Ryengoth]

Keep in mind that large UV lamps produce a lot of heat while they are burning, so your water temps can go beyond your heater setting if they are running 24/7 and cycle your system fast enough. Most of the recommended usages I've seen have been 2-3 hours a day at night, when there's no lighting to add to the heating. Normally, that will handle 1-2 turn-overs and should kill most of the suspended organics.

 

[jetmaker]

I run 24/7 with no heat issues

 

[brandon429]

the ones I had were not fancy lab types but they were huge and also ran always. once illegally eradicated an entire 75 gallon tank invasion of cyanobacteria with one. It consisted of hooking up my grandmothers koi pond sterilizer rated at ten thousand gallons, a 4x uv array, to my 75 and hand siphoning the current biomass. The invasion wasn't permitted back as I cheated until taking the tank down on a move. For two years while running that giant uv stuffed behind my tank I never had that or any other invader. It was an illegal cheat because it was done independent of nutrients

 

[Lenny_S]

In my case I'm definitely getting heat from my UV sterilizer.
This is my energy use the day before I added the UV sterilizer. Each spike you see is the heater coming on.

As you can see, it comes on at least half a dozen times a day, and this has been the case for this season so far.

This is the energy use from the day I added the UV sterilizer. The heater only came on twice.

The same pattern for the tank temp..
Before

After

When the lights hit full strength, the temp got higher than the set point. This did not happen before adding the UV sterilizer.

 

[brandon429]

Is that one degree total affect

My little pico reef fluxes three in summertime night/day that's amazing control man.

It's highly possible the uv did heat my 75 up one degree but in using alcohol thermometer with reference chart nicked off to the side some slack must be allowed heh~

 

[Lenny_S]

Is that one degree total affect

My little pico reef fluxes three in summertime night/day that's amazing control man.

It's highly possible the uv did heat my 75 up one degree but in using alcohol thermometer with reference chart nicked off to the side some slack must be allowed heh~

Not even a full degree. But my heater outlet is set to on if < 78.4 degrees and off at 78.5 degrees because I know i will coast up to 78.6 degrees after the heat is shut off because the heater is in the sump and the probe that has the program is in the tank. I have a second probe in the sump to prevent overheating if the circulation fails. But the reason the temperature rise from the UV sterilizer in my system is significant is because I have 200 gallons of water in my system. It takes 10-15 minutes for an 800 watt heater to raise the temp a couple of tents of a degree. So for the tank temp to rise half a degree in a few hours is pretty significant.