Calfo has inspired me to encourage my skimmer to start living up to it's potential. I am far from "a cup of coffee dark skimmate every day". My ASM G3 is simply lazy by those standards. Anyone interested in taking this journey with me, or do all of you already get your cup a day? Any ideas you care to share are very welcome. Once I figure it out, I'd be happy to share my experience with the rest of you.

http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=514199 - http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid =514199

This is my guide. Wish me luck.

Keep in mind that he said a cup a day between skimming and other nutrient exports (i.e. algae).

Sounds like us slackers down south that missed out on the meeting missed a few good tips.  Is there any way that you may be able to share with me either with description or a nice drawing of the idea on this manifold as anyway to get rid of power heads and still have enough water movement sounds like a good plan.

The closed loop is extremely easy.  All my plumping is in the tank so, I was able to do alot of testing to see what worked and what didn't.  I did find out that placing a single 't' with a 90 angle at the end didn't work.  The flow out of the 't' was only a trickle.  I am using a rio 2100 (692gph) and have three 90's before the 90 outlet in 3/4 tubing, which seems to work fine.  I would like a bit more flow though. 

The pressure of my pump wasn't great enough to cause any major leaks.  If anything it would probably on drip if the tubing was slipped in tightly.   So, if you are creating an external system you should mold the pvc together on external connections, but you can allow the pvc in the tank to remain unglued which will allow you to 'tweak' the system and if you're like me that's almost a daily ritual.

John

I was also concerned about my lack of a cup a day skimate!  I do not run an ozonizer, up to recently didn't feed my tank all that much and have a large sump with tons of little critters.  I also have four cleaner shrimp and lots of hermits and snails.  In fact the snails are reproducing like crazys.  The only real problem I see is that my ph remains lower, so I plan on monitoring the redox potential of the tank with my neptune (I still haven't hooked it up yet).  What should I look for?  What's good, OK and bad?  I am very seriously considering buying an ozonizer, which I hear greatly improves waste removal

 Anyway, talking to Anthony afterward, he reiterated that you don't have to run a skimmer to have a good successful tank, but the ozonizer will help clean up your water and keep it clean.

John

Xacttech,

Did you place 't's inline or did you just use 90's.  As stated my 692 gph was adequate with one 90 but didn't create enough backpressure to exit the 't'.  What size pump are you running now?  I would like to add some extra 't's but would have to get a larger pump.  Let us know how the bigger one works.

John

I have a theory I've put together about the "cup a day" after talking with Anthony and reading some of the info on his threads on RC.

I never thought of having your overflow water tapped directly to your sump, but Anthony made that sound like a great alternative. 

So, what do you think of this...  If you had an overflow all the way across the tank that drew off the first 32nd or 16th inch of water and flowed that straight out of a drain at the top of the tank instead of falling to the bottom of the tank first, then flowed that water directly into you're skimmer.  This way you could constantly skim that crud that collects at the surface of the water off the top and ALL of that crud would go directly to the skimmer to get skimmed out.

The way most of us have our tanks set up the water flows in from the first 1/4 to 3/4 inch of tank water leaving a lot of crud on the surface.  This water then goes to the sump and "some" of it gets pumped into the skimmer by the pump connected to the skimmer.  The rest of it is either left in the sump and eventually rises to the surface of the sump and stays there, or is pumped back into the tank having never been skimmed.

The idea of routing all of the water to the skimmer seemed to me a fantastic idea as it would ALL be processed.  The drawback I can see here is it might take a very large skimmer to handle all of the water being served to it from a large tank.

This may help get that "Cup a day."

Keep in mind this "cup a day" is relative.

fish load, tank size, feeding rate, other filtration used, presence of ozone... ect

IF by some miracle you could increase the efficiency of your skimmer to a point where you took out all dissolved organics you would simply starve your system to death.

even excessive macro growth can deplete nutrients required by coral growth.

But with most tanks being  overstocked and overfed  i guess that is not an issue