Water Purification
 

I assumed that skimming would be the first choice of most people. Please explain your preferred method, and if skimming isn't your first choice, why.

you left out refugium.

Yep. Refugium all the way. :wink:

Ditto that, but does refugium include mangrove? Cause thats what I would do, fuge/mangrove combo.

Infact, I want to try that on a large tank, lol.

I vote large macro fuge as well

Live rock cause that what I use now :mrgreen:

Macro (chaeto, red halimenia & prolifera) & lowered feeding rates.

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I voted other.

I would do a fuge/berlin style sump with a refersed flow fluidized sandbed to optimize bacterial cultures.

i just used carbon and that's it......now it got a skimmer a year ago and i notice alot less algea.I had a eclipse canopy with 2 n/o 15 watt and "3 stage" filter on the 20, I have had my 20 gal since i was 12..... now 20. i never knew about all this info. on the net it really helps out lots!!!!!!

did this statement come from a reef word generator? it doesnt even make sense.

AHH, the fuge. I knew I forgot something...

Annother glitch is that most of us already have live rock and a sand bed. Oh well, I'm getting the picture.

Danny, I didn't have enough options on the poll to include combos. No soup for you. Banned for life!

Voted other for my turf scrubber. :smile:

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I can draw it for you.

We have no skimmers on any of our three reefs and I replied other.

We use a combination of mechanical filtration and marcoalgae in the tanks.

polo :mrgreen:

NO! Marco Polo is NOT in my tank :lol:

Caught me in a typo, you lucky guy :wink: Actually, my posts are riddled with typos. Stupid fingers don't do what my brain is telling them to do. Or else I have a stupid brain and pretty smart fingers. Oh, who knows where the problem is :razz: Anyway, have to edit heavily before posting otherwise all my posts would pretty much be gibberish :razz:

I would use no of the above. I agree on the refugium. What about an Ozinizer.

There is a serious flaw in the poll question. It matters not to me that skimmers exist because I don't use one, and most importantly I have no desire, or plan to get one. IMO skimmers are grossly overrated gadgets.

I would think you would have to try one in order to be able to say whether they are overrated or not. If you could say you ran without one, then ran with one, then ran without one again, and saw no benefit with the skimmer, then you could say they are overrated. But saying they are overrated without ever trying it, im not sure how you would justify your opinion.

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Bob, if you've never had one then how can you possibly decide if they are "grossly overated" Have you seen skimmate?

It would of course be an exercise in futility to engage in an argument. I have stated an opinion, and that is as far as I will go. I have run a very successful reef tank for the last five years without resorting to a skimmer except a brief unsatisfying experience with one, and my decision is to leave the gadget to those who believe there is need for one.:biggrin:

Yes, it is possible to run a successfull reef without a skimmer, nobody will argue that.

But could that same reef be run easier, and possibly even healthier, with a skimmer?

Bob, what skimmer did you try, on what size tank? What made the experience unsatisfying?

I'm with boB on this one.

A few years ago, we ran a Precision Marine HOT skimmer on our first two reefs for about 2-3 years. Produced great skimmate! But fiddling with it to remove micro bubbles, fiddling to get the skimmate not too wet or too dry, and coming home to at least two floods was just too much freaking work! Now that we live in a second storey condo, floods are a major no-no :razz:

I know we do exta work to compensate for the lack of skimmers on our three reefs, but we don't have any more floods and don't have to fiddle with extra machinery. IMO, our reefs look great.

Rory and countless others have seen our skimmerless reefs. Anyone care to comment on how our reefs are doing without skimmers?

I think you can run a tank just fine without a skimmer. However once you get into the bigger tanks a skimmer is almost a necessity, due to the amount of time and money required to due major upkeep all the time. My total system volume nears 250 gallons and I would not like changing 10-20% of this every week. If I was retired and didn't have much on the go, well I could manage that, but I'm not. I perfer doing less waterchanges and pulling oodles of junk out with my skimmer. I also think that the balance in my tank is better due to the fact that I'm always pulling out waste that is theoretically introduced as food everyday. It dosen't accumulate until my next water change.

Bev gets away with not skimming, but she's also on a very strict maintenance schedule that some people would have a hard time adhereing to.

If that same reef is my reef, the answer is emphatically NO

It must be remembered that I have been keeping salt water tanks off and on since the middle seventies. I have probably tried every gadget that was foisted upon the unwary hobbyist. And my findings are that the skimmer is just an overrated gadget.

Fuge and 10-15% weekly water changes on the tank without the skimmer....wait a minute ... same routine for the tank with the skimmer.

Bob, I cannot possibly "remember" that you have been keeping SW tanks since the 70's, I wasn't even born! :)

What size tank(s) are you currently running skimmerless? Any more details on your tanks? Cleaning regiment, fuge, etc?

One thing to keep in mind is what "reef" means to you. I keep primarily SPS, and feel that a skimmer is essential. If I instead kept a tank with zoos and/or softies only, I would have to seriously consider not using a skimmer. I have seen tanks of this type that appear to do better with higher nutrient levels.
We certainly can't argue with Bob about skimmers, he's been not using one for ever and his tanks all do just fine. I use a skimmer and my tank does just fine. So who's right? Both of us. Or neither, depending on how you look at it.

To address the topic, if skimmers didn't exist, I'd use ozone, GAC and water changes. And I'd invent skimmers and get rich!!

The problem with ozone is that the best way to run it is with a skimmer. From what I've read those ozone reactors aren't all that great.

I'd like to point out that people don't do 10-15% water changes weekly. Even those who say they do. (there are exceptions ofcourse)

I'd say the average reefer does 1 per month. (remember there are people out there that do 1 or 2 per year)

Even when we ran a skimmer, we did weekly maintenance on our reefs. I think it's just a good habit to get into. JMHO, though.

So are you saying Im above average?? or just strange :) BTW a 10-15% water change for me is one 5g bucket for each tank.So not alot of work.

Quagmire,

We're probably just strange :razz: :wink:

I am lazy, so to get a water change done every 1-2 weeks, I automate it as much as possible. My barracuda has a t off it to a flexible line through the roof, across the house, and hooks into the drain line with my washing machines. I just change the ball valves, and bad water goes away. I use a plastic trashcan with a pump in the bottom, put in the same amount of salt every time, then put my attachment onto the pump to pump it into my sump. Dont even have to get my hands wet. I let it sit overnight mixing of course.

I decided to make the poll based on the fact that the vast majority of reefers (IMO) would have chosen skimmers as their first choice. I wanted to know what people felt about other forms of filtration and open a general discussion about them.

Ozonators will have to fall into the "other" category, as most people have a budget that wouldn't allow one.

Great input so far,
Rich.

First would be live rock and sand for me, not a skimmer.

I do want to mention that I am not totally devoid of filtration means. I have for years used Chemipure in a Fluval. I don't know if it does wonders as claimed. However, I have never had a problem with tank crashes etc., therefore I will continue using it even when later in the year I am forced to go FOWLR. And as a note to Brad, I have a few bits of SPS corals. Notably a smallish colony of Blue Tipped Staghorn that does great.:mrgreen:

I am a huge fan of protein skimmers but unfortunately it wasn't possible to have one with my impossibly-clean-no-visible-equipment-cube. All I have for filtration is LR in the main tank and LR and chaeto in the cannister filter.

- Chad

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How does Chaeto grow inside on the cannister without light?