melev

Saturday night, my son helped me pump over 200g of saltwater into the 400g tank. Pumping the water into an upright pitcher, it seemed unlikely the water would get cloudy. Yet a day later it was somewhat murky, very different from the 215g running adjacent. Seeing the reef in nice clean water, it seemed like a poor choice moving those corals into the bigger tank.

Using a Reef Octopus skimmer I have on hand, I placed it on an inverted bucket (one with no handle) inside the display tank and turned it on. The collection cup pulled out lime green skimmate.

Over the past 24 hours, nearly 2-gallons of watery skimmate was extracted which resulted in nice clean water.

It's actually rather remarkable that an acrylic gizmo can be injected with tiny air bubbles and all export organics (DOCs for short) out of the system. Tanks running protein skimmers run more cleanly, that's to be sure. Every aquarium I've run successfully had a protein skimmer on it. There are some garbage skimmers on the market but any decent one will do a good job, so do your homework prior to purchase.

I still need to test the water to measure all the parameters before I'll tie it into the living system.