Is it possible to overskim?

Accumulating the equipment for my tank upgrade. I'll have about 150g total. Found a good deal on an aquac ev240. Can you have too much skimmer?? Thanks

 

YES. Over skimming is when the skimmer is doing such a good job that to many trace elements are being removed from the water.

 

You will get many many many opinions on this issue. I agree you can overskim. I run a coralife 65 on my 150g reef. It has been like this for a year and a half, and I have had no issues. All my corals are great and readings are perfect. I have to empty it every three days. JMO. However with that said. I am a stickler on maintenance. I do a 25g water change every 2 weeks, and I have never missed. I also run a U.V.

 

Yes, you can overskim, IM(NSH)O. There's some systems, and livestock, that need much higher nitrates to grow; the tank suitable for SPS can be limiting, or even detrimental, to a coral like an Elegance or some softies.

 

I would add any non-photosynthetic coral to this list.

 

yes you can definitely over skim I have first hand experience with it. I put a Coralife 125 on a 10 gallon and my corals looked pretty bad after a week.(for reference when I did it I didn't believe in overskimming and it was a skimmer I had left over from another tank).

 

Well, I don't know if I would go that far, but the idea of some non-photos needing DOC is ok.

I say this because some, like Sun Corals, don't really grab dissolved organics, and are better suited to a clean tank with heavy skimming and feeding.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I guess maybe I will rethink my plan. so the way to go is correctly or maybe even under rated skimmer? If I got the bigger one, like the ev-240 I can get, could I just run it overnight and not during the day to compensate? I would actually prefer that so its even quieter during the day.

 

they already underate them for common stocking practices. The usual recommendation is rated for 2x the size of your tank, I would say just don't go over 3x the size of your tank.

 

You don't want to run it just overnight. As the proteins that a skimmer removes are released into the water, they circulate for a little while, but can stick to live rock and other surfaces in the aquarium, where they'll decay into nitrates. The point of a skimmer is to catch them while they're floating around in the water, so they never get a chance to get to the rocks; running it only during the day would severely hamper its effectiveness for this reason.