What’s with all the bubbles??

[SniffanyB]

We have had the aquarium cycling for 5 or 6 days now and installed a protein skimmer yesterday. I’ve read and watched almost everything I can find on skimmers and even the brand of skimmer and can’t find a good answer. We aren’t new to the saltwater tank, it has been years though, but never had coral in the last tank which we plan on with this one. Will they eventually go away? I’ve seen from 5 days to 2 weeks. That’s a big time frame. We have a 32 gallon FluvalSmart Flex tank and a Fluval Protein Skimmer as well. Any help is so much appreciated. I’m sorry if this has been asked and answered I got excited to find forum and asked before searching. Sorry

 

[ndrwater]

First off, welcome to Reef2Reef you'll like it here!!

Second I'm not quite sure how to answer the question. Is it that you're asking how long before you should turn on the skimmer in a new cycle? I saw that you were asking about corals but the rest of the sentence look like you may have edited

 

[SniffanyB]

Will the skimmer always put bubbles into tank like in the video?

The guy at my LFS said to go ahead to run skimmer while we cycling tank, so we did that. There's just a ton of bubbles. About the coral we plan on having reef and fish this time. The whole skimmer process is a new part of the tank and I'm sure I'm over thinking it or just making more difficult than it really is.

 

[Spieg]

Can't open the video, but if the skimmer is making micro bubbles in the tank, it probably needs to be adjusted. Can you turn down the pump speed, or reduce the air intake?

 

[vetteguy53081]

I personally would wait til week2 to run skimmer as there is really nothing to skim. You can however with this happening fine tune and turn down skimmer and air control if you have one Height of water in the sump will make a difference in the behavior of the skimmer also

 

[nasotang]

Can’t open the video either. If the question is how to get rid of the micro bubbles in the DT then I typically I place the skimmer on the far end of the sump away from the return pump. You can also have the water pass over/under baffles you reduce the bubbles.

If you worried about fine tuning the bubbles in the skimmer then I agree it’s better to wait a few weeks before trying to fine tune.

 

[NS Mike D]

I assume the skimmer is in the sump area. A new tank may not have sufficient Dissolved Organic Carbon to help with the skimmer break in period. The bubbles will stick to each other with the DOcs and travel into the collection cup

You can place a piece of aquarium carbon sponge filter in the out flow to trap the bubbles on the meantime

 

[SniffanyB]

Thanks for all the info. I figured it was early to run it but eith the guy at LFS saying too ahead I went ahead. I will turn it off and turn it back on later in cycle and start fine tuning. Thanks again. So glad to actually find a good answer to the bubble problem.

 

[Sintralcoast]

Looking for answers to with the micro bubbles. Just turned on my skimmer reef octopus 150s and man I can not figure it out!? Ha but from what I see is it has a break in period so do I just leave as is? I turned down the skimmer all the way and opened up the valve all the way but don’t know what is really going to work...

 

[Sleeping Giant]

It's just breaking in, if you can adjust the airflow into it, that would be a good start to slow the amount of bubbles, then it'll run fine