Ultraviolet Sterilizer?

I run UV sterilizers on all my tanks, reef, nano and FOWLR. I find that they are beneficial and never had any problems with my reefs not thriving on them! I dont know much about the Oceanic, I think it is a 3w.......not sure. I have a jbj tank and am running the JBJ version. One thing you want to look at is the availability of the bulbs to be replaced. My LFS only carries 6, 9, 18w bulbs. I have 2 sterilizers that I had a hard time finding the bulbs for as it is 7W.

It is real important that you change the bulbs out every 6 months!

How big is your tank?

 

I worked in a refinery for 25 years operating boilers, generators, etc along with water treatment. We had a RO system that had 8 skids which produced 325 gpm each for a total of 2600 gpm. The system originally had UV sterilizers but were removed. In our application they were of little effect. They did not kill the bugs that would plug the RO membranes. We learned other ways to maintain the RO's and dismantled the UV's. It was ironic to open the UV vessels to do maintenance and find microorganisms growing on the bulbs.

Good luck,
Rick

 

I run one on my reef.The day I put it in I could easily see an improvement in water clarity.I also dose calcium so I always check the bulbs to see if the are filmed but they haven't needed cleaning yet.Ive never had a fish get ich,dont know if its the sterilizer or just good luck

 

I can't imagine any UV sterilizer being able to work with such a fast dwell time.

As far as reef tanks go, I love them. You don't have to clean your glass. If you were to get a cyanobacteria bloom, all you have to do is squirt it into the water column to hit your filter and nuke them, etc. If you want them to affect ich, it's challenging because half the time the parasite is imbedded into a fish or holding onto the sand. There's only a portion of time where they are in the water column. They can lessen the quantity of the parasite though.

 

I bought one for peace of mind when I had a bit of an Ich problem. I started dosing Kent's Marine C (Vitamin C to boost immune systems), bought Oceanic's UV sterilizer (to kill free floating parasites), and all of my fish are now healthy without any sign of parasites. I stopped dosing the Vitamin C once they got better, but obviously my UV remains on constantly since its in-line.

It could have been the Vit C or the UV (or the immune boosting garlic in their food) that helped but there's no telling. Their immune systems could have also fought the ich off on thier own.

If you want peace of mind and insurance, spend the money.

 

You need to do some reading about UV contact time. Depending on what you're trying to kill will depend on the UV wattage and gph through the UV. I have a 39 watt with a flow of about 1000gph going through it, which will help for algea, but will not help with parasites. If I wanted to deal with parasites, I'd have to slow that flow down to about 300gph. That's why my belief is that although people put them on their system to help with Ich, most are improperly operated.

Take a look at this link for further explaination:
Proper Aquarium Water Quality: UV Sterilizers: Which one is right for you?

 

See my thread on this topic: http://www.3reef.com/forums/filters-pumps-etc/uv-sterilizer-wattage-question-100238.html

 

The info fosters and smith is giving is really misleading. Since its a general chart, and each units contact time is different because of how its made, how the water flows threw and has contact time with the bulbs light. really if you are going to purchase a uv. go on line and read the manual for the uv unit your considering, and see what its good for at what flow rates.
all uv units are not created equal.

 

I hate to bust some peoples' bubbles, but it takes an inordinately large UV sterilizer to knock ich out (as a relation to tank size).

Most UV sterlizers operate in the 15,000 microwatt-sec/cm2 range at rated flows. Ich requires a dosage on the order of 15-20 times that to be knocked out. If you want to double the dosage you have to either put twice the UV sterilizer on or halve the flow rate.

Check out the following table:
UV Dosages for Proper UV Disinfection

This shows you what dosages are required to kill common organisms.

The following page from Aquatic Eco Systems lists out a range of sterilizers (similar to Rainbow Lifeguard).

Some calculations:

100 Gallon Tank
Let's say you had a 100 gallon tank and you wanted to dose for Ich. You'd want probably 10 times tank turnover run through it per hour meaning a 1000 gph rating (16 gpm). That would mean that the UV32 product on the Aquatic Eco page would get you about the dosage necessary to kill algae in the water (23437.5 mW-s/cm2), but you'd need to move up to at least two of the UV195 models to get Ich. That's more than $2500 in equipment and 12 lamps replaced every 8 months or close to $600 per year in bulbs alone!

 

Some of us don't really worry about ich. I use them for what they do well.