Thoughts on over skimming

[sphelps]

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

I severly overskim my tanks and got fantastic results, remember if you are over skimming you have to pay closer attention to your water peramiters, and make sure your compensate your feeding, ie feed more often or feed more as good skimming will remove waist food faster.

I had LPS and SPS, worms, Pods. which thrived in my overskimmed tanks, and had to scrape coraline algae off the glass every day, so I don't think overskiming is your problem as much as water peramiters/light/ect.

My Brain grew from a 3" base to a 6" base in about 6 months, mushroom became such a problem I had to remove them as they were taking over, and SPS gave me amazing growth rates.. all while using a skimmer that was probably rated for 6X the system volume of water. I ran the skimmer so it made a fairly dry foam, ran a Co2 reactor, Kalk reactor, sever water flow (aprox 120X turnover) but I did run a slightly elivated Alk, I liked 1.026 for salinity, 11 to 12Dkh, about 380 to 400 Ca, 1400 Mg, and my Ph was always around 7.9 I ran two AB 10K SE bulbs driven by M80 ballasts on a 3 foot tank plus two 3 foot VHO actinic bulbs overdriven about 14%. the tank was bare bottom, but I built Pod piles behind the rock work. I find the bigest mistake people make is not building pod piles as this gives them a place to grow with out worry of preditation. I had two mandrins and they always were eating pods which I feel was due to the pod piles as they mandrens can't get into them, so the pods can reproduce like mad and as the populatin increases they spread through out the tank.

Steve

What water parameters are you referring to? Anything I can test seems fine and I do 10% weekly water changes with RB salt. I don't have heavy light in my tank and I keep my LPS lower or in shady areas. The LPS did fine at first but lately a decrease in health in some is obvious.

From my experience higher nutrients results in healthier LPS, my first reef tank was an LPS tank, basically skimmerless and I never fed them, never have I had LPS corals as healthy as they were in that tank.



I'm willing to sacrifice some SPS color for healthier LPS, i would actually prefer to keep a more LPS dominant tank. Can any one see any potential problems resulting from running a skimmer on a half duty cycle over night?