skimmer in a 20 gallon long

[Dave MN Nano]

Anybody use a protein skimmer in a 20 gallon reef? How does it work?? I am thinking about adding a HOB skimmer.

[A.m.P]

They work fine, the HOB's can leak sometimes -like anything else outside the tank- but there are plenty of solid options on the market.

[Lauraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa]

Honestly, rather than a HOB option, I'd recommend taking a look at an internal skimmer like some of the Tunze models. While it might seem like it'd be an eyesore, they end up blending in fairly well (especially if you have a black background), and I've found them to work better plus you don't have the leak concern.

[bluewhale]

I have an 80 Liter (aprox 17,5 gal) tank, using an internal skimmer. However I don't let it run the whole day but about 10 hours per day, which seems to be sufficient for my setup. 

[less than bread]

I just got the Biocube skimmer for my 20 gallon AIO and so far I like it. It's only been going for a couple weeks so no real numbers to report yet. But it has broken in, no more microbubbles, and it is removing yucky smelly crap.

[jservedio]

I used skimmers for 5-6 years on my 20g, both a tiny internal one and a bigger one in my sump, but ended up removing both of them because it just wasn't needed with the way I ran the tank and ended up actually being a detriment after the tank reached maturity. What is your reason for wanting a skimmer? Do you have a specific problem you are trying to address with it? For example, if you are a bit overstocked on fish now that they aren't babies anymore, a skimmer is a good option to soak some of that up. If you aren't, you are just starving your corals of organics they need.

 

A bigger HOB or a skimmer to put in a sump are going to do do their jobs very well, but the tiny little cheap ones (think Aquaticlife 115 sized micro skimmers) are almost entirely useless. While you will definitely get some skimmate out of them, what you pull out will pale in comparison to what your coral and the other life in your tank can process - they just aren't going to move the needle much. I'd bet a healthy fist-sized coral colony or anemone will utilize more organics than a mini internal skimmer can pull out, and they are about the same price!

[Dave MN Nano]

@jservedio I think my 20 gallon has a fairly large fish load - 2 oscellarus clowns, a royal gramma, a yellow watch man goby, a firefish, a cleaner shrimp, a pistol shrimp + snails and hermit crabs. My tank is also getting full of soft and LPS corals - frogspawn, hammers, torches, duncans, zoas, pallys, kenya trees and toadstools, mostly. You raise an interesting question - I have read elsewhere that corals add to bioload but you are sounding like corals do not add to bioload or even help with nutrients?

 

The reason I am adding is: My nutrients are pretty well under control. Consistently 5 ppm nitrates and 0.06 ppm phosphate. Yet, I get algae outbreaks? Why? The algae outbreaks are a pain and I want them to go away. Tim Brightwell, in some recent videos, said that phosphate measuring kits only measure inorganic phosphate not organic. He said that inorganic is only 1% of the total phosphate. I also read that skimmers remove disolved organics like organic phosphate. Maybe dissolved organic phosphate is what is causing my algae outbreaks?? Long explanation but that is how I got to the skimmer idea.

[mitten_reef]

@Dave MN Nano, would you care to share your current setup with pics, etc?  or better yet, feel free to create a tank thread/journal so others looking to share tips and advices can refer to if need be. 

Sounds like your tank has come along nicely since you first started posting topics on here, and would love to see the progress moving forward (or if you have historical progress to share that'd be nice too)  

[Dave MN Nano]

@mitten_reef Good idea. I'll see what historic pictures I have to post also.

 

If I didn't have these periodic algae outbreaks I would say it's going great. And I am really grasping at straws to figure out why they happen.

[jservedio]

5 hours ago, Dave MN Nano said:

@jservedio I think my 20 gallon has a fairly large fish load - 2 oscellarus clowns, a royal gramma, a yellow watch man goby, a firefish, a cleaner shrimp, a pistol shrimp + snails and hermit crabs. My tank is also getting full of soft and LPS corals - frogspawn, hammers, torches, duncans, zoas, pallys, kenya trees and toadstools, mostly. You raise an interesting question - I have read elsewhere that corals add to bioload but you are sounding like corals do not add to bioload or even help with nutrients?

 

The reason I am adding is: My nutrients are pretty well under control. Consistently 5 ppm nitrates and 0.06 ppm phosphate. Yet, I get algae outbreaks? Why? The algae outbreaks are a pain and I want them to go away. Tim Brightwell, in some recent videos, said that phosphate measuring kits only measure inorganic phosphate not organic. He said that inorganic is only 1% of the total phosphate. I also read that skimmers remove disolved organics like organic phosphate. Maybe dissolved organic phosphate is what is causing my algae outbreaks?? Long explanation but that is how I got to the skimmer idea.

So you are definitely a bit overstocked on fish and as they continue to grow, the bioload will increase quite a bit (can't say how much as I don't know how old your fish are) so a skimmer is a great choice for dealing with this. Thanks to the square-cube law and how that mass affects metabolic rate (Kleiber's law), bioload does not simply increase linearly as fish grow - it increases exponentially. For example, a grown 3.5" adult female clownfish will use very roughly 12x the energy of a 1" long juvenile even though it's only essentially "tripled" in size (this is a gross oversimplification, but gives a good idea of the relationship between fish size and bioload). This is why tank overstocking problems can take several years to manifest and come on gradually until they hit a tipping point and why most tanks don't last past a few years before they have to be upgraded.

 

Corals both add to the bioload and directly uptake nutrients and other complex organics - they are essentially their own complex little ecosystems (why we now refer to it as the "coral holobiont"). Corals do produce waste, but they pull far more nutrients out of the water column than they are put into it.

 

The reason for periodic algae outbreaks can be extremely complex, but if your tank is young (like under 2-3 years old) it may be mostly detached from the levels of nutrients available in the water column (basically ecological succession happening). This makes pinning them down even harder than they already are.

 

While it's true that test kits only pick up inorganic phosphorus, which makes up a fraction of the total phosphorus in the system, not all of that organic phosphate is going to be readily bioavailable (or bioavailable at all) to algae. Add in that different species of algaes, cyano, dinos, etc. will use different ratios of organic and inorganic phosphate, the huge number of different phosphate molecules, and that it takes time to make some of those inorganic phosphates bioavailable for algae. Then add in all of the other bacteria, sponges, corals and tiny critters who are able to directly uptake complex organic molecules plus a whole load of other nutrients we don't test for and it becomes pretty clear you aren't going to be able to understand everything that is going on just by testing N and P. On top of that, algal blooms tend to be cyclical because as the algae dies, it releases those locked up nutrients slowly back into the water column as organic phosphates we don't test  for. And none of that even takes into account competition within the tank.

 

* Note: I'm bad at chemistry, particularly organic chemistry.

[Dave MN Nano]

@jservedio my tank is around 1.5 years old. Will my algae outbreaks probably stop in another 1.5 years or so???

[Jakesaw]

14 minutes ago, Dave MN Nano said:

@jservedio my tank is around 1.5 years old. Will my algae outbreaks probably stop in another 1.5 years or so???

My 10 gal reef tank is about same age as yours. My algae has been under control since adding snails, but Bubble Algae & DINO came out of no-where.  Trying to beat it back into submission.

 

FW fish tanks are definitely more simple life.  Sometimes I miss that. 

[jservedio]

3 hours ago, Dave MN Nano said:

@jservedio my tank is around 1.5 years old. Will my algae outbreaks probably stop in another 1.5 years or so???

There really is no way of knowing. I was simply adding that the boom-bust cycles of ecological succession are playing a huge rule in the first few years of a tanks life that adds yet another layer of complexity to the algae issues. All I can say is that these cycles become longer and slower the older a tank gets. In the first few months of a tanks life you are going through boom-bust cycles over periods of weeks, even days (diatoms being an example) at the very beginning. You are going to go through these cycles regardless of your nutrient levels and stability - you can do your best to control and minimize them, but you can't cheat the fact that different organisms grow at wildly different rates and nature won't allow a vacuum to exist. Starting with real live rock over dry rock gives you a big head start on this, but it doesn't eliminate it.

 

A skimmer will definitely help with your bioload (I'd go as big as possible in your tank) and unless you purchased grown fish, they still have a lot of growing to do and your bioload will continue to increase for years to come. I want to say it took 3 or 4 years before my clowns were even remotely close to their current size.