Help - Worms making black webs in my new coral tank

[reef]

Did you say mainly softies, wasp

http://www.korallenriff.de/mark_re_korallen.html

To go skimless you need huge sump which is not possable most of the time.

But getting a good skimmer is a must

[Ira]

I give it 5...No, 7 years before skimmers go out of fashion and people start going skimmerless.

[wasp]

I know there is sps also

But the tank is slanted towards softies, lps gorgonians, and I would expect that to be the aim in such a skimmerless sytem.

Also, I have no idea what the filtration is, but I'm going to stick my neck out and bet there will be a major refugium plus chemical filtration such as carbon. No problem with that, can do an excellent job, and if well run, almost negate any advantage from a skimmer.

But to tell a starting reefer it is a good idea to go skimmerless is just not quite the whole deal.

[lduncan]

Calurpa takes certain forms of phosphate out. It also introduces calurpins, which has a toxic effect on some animals. Calurpa is less than 0.04% phosphorous by weight. It takes a lot of calurpa to remove a little phosphate.

Skimmers do remove phosphate, it is their primary purpose. Not to mention all the other organics, like calerpins, turpines etc, which skimmers remove, which would otherwise end up causing trouble.

These have to be removed somehow. Without a skimmer, there is a LOT of maintenance involved.

Of course there are "band-aid" type temporary solutions which you can use to delay maintenance (like DSB's), but sooner or later they fail too.

Layton

[lduncan]

A skimmerless system may be more suited to corals which come from lagoon areas (like cataphylias), close to "muddy" type sediments, where larger phosphate fluxes occur naturally. As opposed to reef crests with high water flow away from fine muddy sediments, where phosphate levels tend not to be as high or cyclic.

Layton

[wasp]

There are rumors of healthy tanks with no skimmer, but I've yet to see one that really measures up by todays standards.

I'm going to concede here, I was wrong, that tank you showed Reef is certainly a pretty successful tank with no skimmer.

I'm still not going to ditch my own skimmer though.

[reef]

Good point wasp, i never suggested that you dont need a skimmer as i skim heavy and have always said you need a good skimmer,

However I was playing the devils advocate to show that you can go skimless.

[Pies]

I think we are all (most) saying what I said earlier.

It would be bad advice to say you don't need a skimmer, hence the reason why almost all of us use one. However it can be done without one.

A friend of mine in Duniden (Cliff) has been running a skimmerless tank with mostly softies and LPS for over 2 years without issues. I know he has since added a skimmer to the tank, and its doing better, but it was fine before. he has no calurpa and just delt to it with water changes, LR and I am not sure what else. The photos i saw made it easly as good as most of the peoples tanks i've seen on this forum.

Go the skimmer.

Pie

[reef]

The photos i saw made it easly as good as most of the peoples tanks i've seen on this forum.

I dont think that would be hard to do, but tanks are getting much better in NZ.

I think i can count more than 3 tanks that are worth seeing as in the past there were not many.

Tanks these days are getting better and in a few years there should be some beauties.

[Brianemone]

mines worth seeing twice so wheres the other one???

give it time and i think a few of the tanks on this site will be up there with the best