Finally a real fuge built

Another thought Mike – and I think this is where I don’t consider all that I should. I tend to follow the 10/1 fuge theory that I adopted from Tangster so many years ago. This is where I falter a lot, I automatically presume everyone does this – a mistake on my part….

What are your thoughts on this:
if you follow the 10% of DT per hour and skim pre fuge would you think there could be an issue? Versus if you grow cheato under lots of flow and pre-skimming.

I’ll consider my fuge for a moment. I perk 20 gallons per hour through my fuge. The pre-fuge side is 20 gallons, which will basically turn over once per hour under my 10/1 set up. If I put a skimmer in this section with lets conservatively say a 700 GPH pump (I think my super skimmer uses 700-1000/hour pump) I will effectively turn the pre-fuge water over in my skimmer 35 times prior to feeding my fuge, thus starving my fuge.

In my opinion if you are blasting water through the fuge and growing cheato than the skimmer would not turn all the water and the two would work in harmony. What do you think ?

 

I totally agree with all of that. If you're running your skimmer in a slow flow compartment before the fuge it's going to clean the water much better, but I still don't see macro's not growing due to lack of nutrients as a bad thing.

One more thought on this that just dawned on me:

Why do we add fuges in the first place?
To remove nitrates and phosphates of course. That's what they feed on.

If they feed on nitrates and phosphates how could a skimmer starve them?
It can't. Skimmers don't remove phosphates or nitrates, and if they do than I've been giving really bad advice to people who have nitrate problems lol. Skimmers can attempt to remove waste before it turns into nitrates, but they can never be 100% successful. If a skimmer could completely remove all nutrients before they started their way through the cycle than we wouldn't even need live rock.

I guess what I'm getting at is, even if you are pre-skimming it's not removing anything that the macro actually feeds on. You could run water with 50ppm nitrate through a skimmer all day and it will still come out with 50ppm nitrate.


I had to move the chaeto out of the lower fuge to make way for an anemone, so no I don't even have any proof