Remora C skimmer OR HOB refugium?

[Boomerblaster]

Hey everyone! I have come to a conclusion that i am going to need a skimmer or a refugium to keep my nitrates in check. I have 0 ammonia and 0 nitrites. I am just realizing that i am having some problems with my nitrates. I can't even really tell because of the Red Sea test kit i bought (BIG mistake). But, i am using distilled water from WalMart (purple cap), which someone recommended to me here on the boards. I cant afford an RO unit at the moment. So should i get a refugium (one of those HOB ones) or should i opt for the Remora C skimmer with maxijet? I am going to try my best to convince my dad to feed me some money for the new investment. I am currently running a simple HOB filter. I am not going to sump my 20 gallon H. Just not practicle for me. Please help guys, i want to give up so bad. My 2nd half of the TBS package is coming saturday. My rock is doing extremely well though. Thanks everyone! I appreciate ALL of your help!

 

-Jonathan

[Aiptasia]

Well, it's two different schools of thought. The answer is you could go either way, but i'd rather see you go with a skimmer. Skimmers remove DOC compounds from your water before they even have a chance to be broken down by the nitrogen cycle, so they remove a lot of junk before it has a chance to become nitrate.

 

Refugiums just create a little extra space for nitrifying bacteria to breed, and DOC loving algaes to grow, without being predated on by fish or crabs or snails. A refugium will have to cycle just like any other tank before it starts helping you with controlling nitrates. Most people that use them for nitrate reduction stick fast growing algae species in them, such as Caulerpa spp., and prune them back once a week by pinching off new growth. Refugia are also excellent homes for pods and zooplankton to breed in, creating a natural renewable food source for your tank.

 

Also, removing the filter media from your HO filter will remove a constant nitrate maker. You should let your live rock and sandbed (if you have one) do the filtering for you. You said the "2nd half of the TBS package" is on it's way, what did you order? More live rock? or corals?

 

If you've ordered corals/inverts, you may want to perform a multi-step water change now to reduce those nitrates. Surf over to saltwater.about.com and search for multistep water changes. If you follow the method step-by-step, your tank will be nitrate free within a half hour.

 

I'd install a Red Sea Prizm Deluxe skimmer, or a Aqua-C remora or CPR Bakpak II reef ready skimmer and let the LR do all of the work. Cut back on feeding your tank to twice a week, and then spot feed your corals with a plastic syringe and spot feed your fish and inverts. Broadcast feeding will quickly raise your nitrates out of control. For example, I feed small coral polyps alternating doses of micro-vert, phytoplankton and zooplankton by syringe, larger polyps all of the above and baby brine shrimps and Ocean Nutrition frozen foods (thawed first in a cup of water), my hermit crabs get three or four tetra sinking pellets designed for corydoras catfish and my arabian dottyback feeds on pods and stray bits of food from the syringe when I feed the corals.

 

By target feeding bi-weekly, you can control your food inputs and ensure that each animal gets just the proper amount and type of food it needs. It is not necessary to feed your tanks every single day/night. Doing that only leads to high nitrates.

 

Also, even if you don't go with a refugium, consider adding some fast growing DOC loving algaes that can pull nitrates right out of your water. I use Caulerpa prolifera, Ulva sea lettuce and red gracillus algaes in my tanks and as they grow and add new tissue, they pull nitrate right out of the water as fertilizer. My caulerpa especially grows very quickly and I have to prune it back every week to two weeks depending on how fast it grows. Sometimes macroalgae can secrete defensive substances into the water which can irritate SPS corals, so you can use a little GAC on one day a week to pull those substances out of the water if you want. DOC algaes can also release bactericides into the water which can have a healing effect on injured corals and fish, and are generally not harmful to your beneficial bacteria. Also, several algae eating fish and inverts love to graze on them.

[Boomerblaster]

Wow! Thanks so much for that great reply, it helped a lot. I think i am going to go with my skimmer idea. I am going to go take the filter media out of the HOB right now. And the second half of the TBS package is coming saturday. It comes with all of my inverts and the rest of my live rock. Check out TampaBaySaltwater.com and look at the package. It's awesome! Thanks so much once again!

 

-Jonathan

[Aiptasia]

Yeah, i've seen TBS's rock. It's almost all aquacultured Florida LR and they ship it wet, which is nice. It's usually very pink and sometimes comes in with a lot of wildlife in it, especially macroalgaes, bristleworms and mantis shrimps. Sometimes it has orange encrusting sponge or purple turkey liver sponge on it, so keep it wet when introducing it to the tank. Even a brief exposure to air and the sponge will trap air pockets inside of it and die.

 

Some people love their LR, some people hate it. I've never been a big fan of carribean and florida rock anyway, even when you could still get wild rock. It's very dense and heavy and usually comes in rounded, boulder shapes without a lot of caves or natural curvature. I prefer indo-pacific LR, like tonga rock, Kaelini rock and even the new Pukani rock looks amazing (check out www.drmaccorals.com).

 

Knowing what I already know about florida LR, i'd consider giving the LR a bath in water mixed to a specific gravity of 1.040 in a cheap new styrofoam beer cooler. By giving each piece a 20-30 minute soak in the saltier water, it will drive out adult mantis shrimps and big bristleworms, which could potentially harm corals and other inverts, like snails and crabs. It won't kill them, just irritate them into leaving the rock to find better water.

 

Take each bag of wet rock and totally submerge it in the cooler full of salty salt water, then open the bag and remove the pieces of LR underwater. This will protect the encrusting sponges if it has any on it. Then, remove the bag and let each piece of rock sit in the bath for a half hour. After it's soaked, you can fill the bag with regular S.G. seawater (1.022), place the bag back into the bath, and transfer the rock underwater again back into the bag. Then, you can submerge each bag into your display tank and remove the rock.

 

Do this for each bag of rock, and after you're done, you should have some interesting creatures left over in the cooler. You can then pick and choose what you want to introduce to your display tank with a pair of long handled tweezers or a pair of hemostats. Bristleworm bites can be painful, so use tweezers with long handles or wear gardening gloves to avoid being bitten. What you don't want to keep, you can flush down the toilet, namely really big (over 8") bristleworms or mantis/pistol shrimps.

 

It is an involved process and i'm sure there are plenty of people out there that think this is an un-natural and un-necessary step, but i've lost corals to big hungry bristleworms and several people have lost their snails, fish and crabs to mantis shrimps. I've dealt with carribean and florida LR several times, and it's very common to see these creatures in this LR.

[Boomerblaster]

That process is not recommended by TBS, and in fact voids my waranty on the rock. If you just set out the rock for 20 minutes on a tarp before going into the tank the hitchhiking crabs and others will fall off the rock due to the lack of water. This is what TBS tells its' customers to do. If i have 300 dollars invested in rock i am going to follow the company's recommendations. Thanks for the great replies though! I appreciate the time you're taking to help me out. By the way i didn't get a single bad hitchhiker on my first shipment! (knock on wood for the second shipment) Thanks again!

 

-Jonathan

[hammbo]

As an experiment, I put some spaghetti macro in the outflow chamber of my CPR Bakpak and hung a 15w light on the side. Nitrates dropped in 2 days from 40 ppm to 15 ppm. I don't know if it will work in the long run, but the results are pretty good so far.

[WhiteRat]

Boomerblaster, back when I started up my tank, TBSW hadn't added that '20 minutes' bit. I frankly would avoid it. A mantis that doesn't bail in one minute isn't all that likely to budge in 20, and you will lose lots of neat sponges. Sponges are filter feeders that will help keep DOC low in your tank, so I consider them desireable. I've still got quite a few on my rock a year and a half later.

 

I appreciate Aiptasia's point of view, but my rock had no macroalgae on it, a few more mantis shrimps than I'd like (only one left now), and I had no bristleworms...Not that bristleworms are bad things. I had some interesting non-aiptasia rock anemones, lancelets, diverse interesting crab species, feather dusters, a short-spined sea urchin, pistol shrimps, Atlantic sea cucumbers, hidden cup coral, barnacles, and some kind of leather coral. It's also quite craggy and cavernous.

 

How awful!

 

Ratty

Ratty's Reef