Too big of skimmer?

Which Bubble Magus?

Also we are at the mercy of whether or not the skimmers you are looking at are accurately rated.... But Reef Octos and BMs are pretty good about that.

And honestly... we can argue the finner points of just how much is too much.... but again to be practical.... if you have no immediate plans for going bigger.... the added size cost and power simply is not doing anything for you... so why get a huge skimmer for a small tank?

 

BUBBLE-MAGUS - Aquarium Internal skimmer|external skimmer|Dosing pump|Calcium reactor|Nitrate reductor/NO3 reductor|Filters|Turtle shell lampshade|Water monitor and controller|Additives|moonlight LED

the bubble magus M3.5 cone skimmer rated for tanks between 25 and 80 gallons may be ideal if your looking for a sump model IMO

Got to agree with everything Powerman says about skimmers, and follow that principle by using a skimmer rated at 1.3 x the volume on my tank - could have gone bigger, but feel that having a skimmer rated at twice the volume, working half as hard as it could do
seemed to me, to be inneficient.

Steve

 

+1 That is what i would do!

 

Yeah, I was leaning towards the Bubble Magus NAC 3+ or 3.5 rated at 65 gallons. It's smaller but also cheaper.

 

I think any of them would work great

 

Ya those BM cones are nice little buget cones. For just a tad more, the SWC would be a little nicer but same catagory. The 120 goes for $225. You are on the right track.

 

Well, a skimmer is only designed to remove, surfactants. This may be , decaying organic matter as well as many food sources for corals such as plankton (bacterio, zoo, phyto). By everything, I meant everything it is designed to pull out.

The fact of the matter is. If I take the best skimmer I can find and skim the heck out of a tank. Then, take a water sample and put it under a microscope, there will still be plenty of plankton and decaying organics.
Also, as a side note, I'm not sure I agree that you could pulls out food too fast, so as to reduce dwell time for corals to eat, without removing too much of the food source. I think what your describing is actually two sides of the same thing.

One important point then, is when we discuss "over-skimming", we need to define what we are over-skimming with regards to. This is because mathmatically, we can't remove everything, maybe a lot, but not everything... Certainly we can over-skim with regards to say a NPS filter-feeder. However, it appears to be much more difficult to over-skim with regards to a acro for example. IMO however, I think it would take considerable effort, even to over-skim with regards to a softcoral.

So, I do not believe that over-skimming is a common issue, even when using a significantly over-sized skimmer. Our skimmers just do not appear to be efficient enough to cause starvation of a photosynthetic coral, in a well lit environment. You may wast electricity though as you pointed out.

Again though, I do agree that there is no benefit to going significantly over-sized, but also little risk, other than inefficiency.

 

Got it.

The common myths around "over skimming" is that

it takes out trace elements.... FALSE
It takes out too much food and starves corals.... TRUE to a point.

Most of the time I hear about over skimming it is generally some guy that hooked up a good skimmer and saw a decline in corals and concluded it was the skimmer. Not very clear. Again... what is usually missing is the increase in feeding.

Not that skimmers remove too much food... but that you can now and should now increase feeding because you have cleaner water and don't have to worry about as much waste.

Plus... when I talk about feeding.... I'm actually talking about trying to reproduce what goes on in a natural reef. There are no feeding times. Food comes available all day and things grab what they can when they can. So I tried to leave my skimmer off at night for a few hours after lights out and the corals came out for feeding and I stirred up the sump and dosed food to let the corals grab as much as they could. I figured the fish activity durring the day rooting around the reef stirred up enough through the day.


One last thing about what you said.... about skimming and then taking a water sample and still seeing stuff.... the thing about our filtration is that it is not a once through system. It is not very efficient. Say a skimmer was 90% efficient at removing what it is supposed to at a given flow.... well then 10% would get through and should be caught on the next pass. But that is not what we have. We have a overflow that only takes off the surface. We rely on powerheads to circulate the tank and mix with that. Then the sump has a flow rate not necessarily matched to the skimmer.... so we rely on "turnover" rates and say if we are turning over the sytem gallonage 10 times an hour (my overrated skimmer actually did an actual tank turn over of 2.5x per hour)... that should be plenty to remove everything from the water. But that is far from what really happens. Much never gets filtered... a phyto or a molocule of water could last a year without ever seeing the sump. The point is that we ARE filtering enough to know we have good water and feeding and things growing and the bacteria taking care of the rest.