The Puffer Forum

I asked a question about skimmers the other day and a bunch of people told me that I don't need a skimmer with a fish only tank. It's when you add live rock and corals is when you need a skimmer. Is this true? I am planning on doing a fish only saltwater at start off with because I have never done a saltwater before and then add live rock and corals when I get a little bravor.

It is probably even more important to use a skimmer without live rock then with, as live rock adds to your biological filtration. Without LR, the skimmer is pretty much your ONLY filtration. If you want to do it right, get the LR & skimmer. You'll also need powerheads to move the detritus around the tank, so it doesn't settle & it'll get to the skimmer.

Pufferpunk wrote:It is probably even more important to use a skimmer without live rock then with, as live rock adds to your biological filtration. Without LR, the skimmer is pretty much your ONLY filtration. If you want to do it right, get the LR & skimmer. You'll also need powerheads to move the detritus around the tank, so it doesn't settle & it'll get to the skimmer.

PP said it... If you don't have LR, a skimmer would be a must. In my opinion, live rock is the best filtration for marine tanks. Depending on the size of your tank, get 2 lbs of rock per gallon... My 20 gallon has about 38.5 pounds in it. I had the spare funds for a skimmer and 175 MH light also, so I can grow whatever I like.

If you're only doing a FOWLR, then go with rock and forget the skimmer. If you decide to move into corals and other photsynthetic (should probably check the proper spelling of this one lol) organisms, then a skimmer is a must (unless it's a 5-10 gallons or smaller). For a small tank like this, small partial water changes every other day is much better.

As I said earlier, LR and water movement is the best bio filtration for a marine tank. Make sure your flow is good and you have lots of seeded rock...

This is just my opinion. PP likes her skimmers... Oh, I forgot to mention... With the amount of bio I have in my marine tank (mainly from LR and a deep sand bed), I get a reading of 0 nitrates. Yes, 0 nitrates and I've used about 3 different types of tests ( Hagen, API and Elos ). I only run my skimmer for about 8 hours a day. I usually leave it off all night.

With current technology and practices, SW filtration is superior to FW filtration. It requires a lot more tank space and volume to get FW filtration up to what you can get in SW with just LR and a skimmer in SW. if you add a DSB or plenum and a macroalgae refugium you are way ahead of the curve. In either situation, the better and more comprehensive your filtration, the healthier your tank and livestock will be. That is pretty much a given. Yes, you can compromise in either situation, whether FW or SW. But compromises are paid for with shorter lives for the livestock due to less-than-optimum water quality and increased upkeep (partials).

You can operate a FW mixed stock transparent box with a single HOB. You can actually operate a SW FO tank the same way. Neither of those will really provide an optimum housing and conditions, and either will be high-upkeep and no ore than fair water quality at the best. Both situations are common in the hobby, and in no small way is the likely cause of the high turnover in this hobby. Folks drop out due to excessive labor and operating costs. They try to keep incompatible fish with ineffective or not sufficiently effective techniques, and have to buy poor to worthless 'quick-fixes' routinely from their LFS or local chain store, and they get burned out in frustration from the expense and poor results.

Doing either FW or SW right from the get-go does cost more upfront and there is more to learn, but operating costs are lower and the routine care requirement is far less and gives much better results. It is easy to keep your interest up when things work for you. Success pays off. Look a PP's reef. That is a show-stopper for anybody. Yes, she has a lot of time and money and care invested in it. But at this point and indefinitely into the future, she could largely support it and perhaps have money left over by selling or trading frags from her inverts to other hobbyists. That has to be rewarding for anybody. There is no magic involved. Just a bit of time and work and knowledge - all of that pays of, if only in personal satisfaction for some setups.

You get back from this or any hobby only based on what you put into it. You can do the minimum and have minimum successes and chronic issues, or you can try for the optimum and learn to achieve it with great satisfaction.

Pick your goals before, not after, you set up anything.

HTH

Wow, Great post!

I'm starting to think that when someone posts a question, nobody should answer except RTR, or at least until RTR responds. No matter what is posted, whether it be in accordance to his thoughts and feelings, or not, he always has some type of rebuttal.

The person asked if a skimmer was needed. I answered that question, without going into an explanation of why people drop out of the hobby, etc.

But back to the point... A FOWLR does not need a skimmer. What water params are being tested that make the skimmer so important? Have you run a tank with AND without a skimmer and compared the results? Were there corals or clams or anything of the like in these tanks?

To me, it's the small, untestable (to the normal hobbyist, myself included) nutrients that are removed by a skimmer, things that can be detremental to corals and the like. Nothing much for a fish(es) to deal with.

Now I'm not arguing that an MBU should be in a smaller than a 1000 gallon tank (a little MFK poke there), I'm just saying that a FOWLR tank is just as good without a skimmer as it would be with one (unless you omit regular partial water changes). Live rock and good current can never be duplicated by a skimmer.

I believe I was the 1st response to this question, not RTR. Without live rock or a skimmer, expect to be doing 50% weekly eater changes, just like a FW tank. Not very economical, IMO.

Pufferpunk wrote:I believe I was the 1st response to this question, not RTR. Without live rock or a skimmer, expect to be doing 50% weekly eater changes, just like a FW tank. Not very economical, IMO.

50% weekly water changes are not needed. You'd be fine with 10-20% as long as you have adequate bio filtration, in other words Live Rock.

I respectfully have to disagree w/geronimo69. Of course you do not have to have a skimmer in a FOWLR tank. You do not even have to have the LR. But unlike what was stated in his rebuttal, the major contaminant removed by a skimmer is dissolved protein - perhaps the largest single class of untestable pollutants. High protein water is high polluition, eutrophic water, whether FW or BW or SW. In FW or low specific gravity BW, we can remove such in small quantity by granular activated carbon (GAC)- but at non-trivial expense and without any positive feedback on how effective our treatment has been. Protein can be remarkably lasting in water, some of the cyclic forms can last up to 18 months easily - and those are the smelliest of the pollutants commonly noted in tanks. Skimmers (which are in reality foam fractionators) take advantage of the physical characteristics of high-specific gravity BW and SW tp capture and remove proteinaceous material from water. That is their primary mode of action, and the basis for their effectiveness. Any tank with specific gravity at or greater than 1.018 will be benefited by the use of a skimmer, and the water change requirement will be reduced by that. BTW, no one can say that water changes at this that or the other level are suffiecient without a lot of modifiers. If you do not spicy the tank size and full stock list (including the LR, macro- and microalgae, etc.), it just does not work.that way. I could point to some tanks on another forum which would not be clean with 100% partials daily, even with a skimmer.

There are no magic numbers for water changes. Only flow-through and discard systems can ignore that effect, and even those must consider rate of flow required for stock and waste levels based on live mass plus nutrient input. We give such percentages routinely, but with the understanding that the tank is conservatively stocked (rare in this hobby) and not over-fed or inappropriately fed. Without expansion and some detail, you are entirely too likely to mislead folks.

Edit note: I am actually a better reactor than originator. One of the biggies on triggering me off is the appearance that we have gotten both too broad and too detailed without checking that the basis for the discussion is understood. It is the sort of training college profs try to instill when they say to "examine your premises". We assume too much understanding that may or may not be actuatty there and understood.

geronimo69 wrote:

Pufferpunk wrote:I believe I was the 1st response to this question, not RTR. Without live rock or a skimmer, expect to be doing 50% weekly eater changes, just like a FW tank. Not very economical, IMO.

50% weekly water changes are not needed. You'd be fine with 10-20% as long as you have adequate bio filtration, in other words Live Rock.

Here was the origional Q:

a bunch of people told me that I don't need a skimmer with a fish only tank.

IMHO skimmers are a must in any tank with a SG greater than 1.018 as the dissolved organics (proteins) removed is tremendous and pivotal to a marine tanks health. To understand why going with LR only isn't a good plan you have to understand how skimming works. The basics of skimming: Water enters the skimmer, air is mixed with the water to create micro bubbles. These micro bubbles (as RTR stated) have an affinity to protein, specifically dissolved proteins. The bubbles gather and make foam that rises up the skimmer neck and over to the skimmer cup taking dissolved organics with it. Skimming happens in nature all the time in both FW and SW environments. The best example is, go to a beach and look at the what is left after the waves crash. Foam. The foam carries the proteins with it and it is deposited on the shore and out of the water. FW, on a river, look along the shore where the current is stirring the water or hitting rocks or bank and you'll see foam. Lakes have the same effect, waves break on the surface or a shore line and foam is created. All of these are natures way of skimming dissolved organics.

Live Rock is also a must in a SW aquarium. It is your bio filter and the main part of the nitrogen cycle along with a growth media for micro fauna and macro fauna plus marine plant life. It does not remove the dissolved organics.

In the end, the health of your aquarium is greatly improved by the quality of your water. Dissolved organics is one thing in aquaria that cannot be measured and with out a skimmer in place water changes are a necessary thing to remove them, depending on the stock, they may be large. Even on my lightly stocked 120 gallon FOWLR with 150lbs of LR and a good skimmer I preform 50% water changes bi-weekly just to keep my water pristine and to replenish any trace minerals that have been depleted. Sometime I do more depending on how hard the skimmer is working.....

Starting a Marine tank is by far no cheap venture and IMHO it would be a foolish venture to do without good skimming, the cost in the end (water changes and shortened live stock life) out weighs the start up cost of buying a skimmer.

Although not actually a must (there were days not too far behind us where no one used LR or skimmers), if you don't use either, expect to be doing the same WC we do in our FW tanks.

Although i still disagree that a skimmer is requried for a FOWLR, I must point out that I DO run a skimmer, mainly because I have corals such as a birds nest and chocolate chip acro that are fairly sensitive to water conditions.

I think we all agree that a skimmer is not required for a tank with live rock. The OP was asking about a tank without any natural biological filtration.

I know your not supposed to go cheap on a skimmer, so what's a good one that's not ridiculously expensive?