Salty tank

[Rory]

Well i've got a 20 g tank, yeah i know its small but its good in a flatting situation where your moving around all the time...

Anyway its a fresh water tank at the moment but i'd like to convert it to a saltwater tank.

I have lights and i plan on getting a canister filter sometime this year, the one peice of equipment i cannot get my head around is the protien skimmer!

Why the hell does this peice of equipment cost so damn much!!!!

Do i need one for a 20g tank? Are there any alternatives?

I was looking around at diy skimmers and came across this:

http://www.planet-reef.com/diyskim.htm

In particular this one here:

Is this not cheap to make? Would it be possible to make this for say...$50???

Why don't freshwater tanks need skimmers?

What im getting at here is the fact that im a broke student and need to work around these expensive problems, any advice would be great.

Thanks guys, i'd love to join the dark side (saltwater) but so far the price of things has been holding me back.

:-?

[wasp]

Yes you could make that, and it would work, may keep a 20 gallon clean depending on bioload. For your $50.00 you would need an air pump and air stone, the rest you may be able to fashion out of something else.

Why do fresh water tanks not have them? Cos fresh water will not foam properly, as salt does. So it's one advantage us salties have, we can have protein skimmers.

[wasp]

BTW, if you are going salt, don't bother with the cannister for bio filtration, all you do in a salt tank is put what is called "liverock" in it. This houses the bacteria to do the filtration, does a better job than a cannister, and for your size tank will cost considerably less.

Actually this brings up something that crops up over and over with people who are changing from fresh to salt. They are so often reluctant to spend anything on a skimmer, which is important for salt, but will happily fork out several hundred for a cannister, which is not needed, and in fact may do more harm than good.

Don't take that personally I know you're just asking .

I've just noticed that I see this same thing over and over.

[HelifaxNZ]

Wasp this is the mentality of freshwater keepers - I was one of them and still am!

Canisters are equivilent freshwater filters to Protein skimmers. But I have to say, Skimmers are expensive for what they "look" like. A hunk of cylinder plastic put together and that's $500 bucks thanks. :lol:

A lot of expense for Skimmers is the actual pumps. They are special ones which produce tiny bubbles to carry the muck into the waste cup. Both work hand in hand, but if you get a decent pump, then the skimmer will work more efficiently. Correct me if I'm wrong guys.

So Rory, throw away the canister and buy a decent skimmer for the price of a decent canister.

Note: the skimmer in your picture is for a sump. If you are not thinking of getting a sump, then you will need to "purchase" a hang on the top skimmer which are traditionally cheaper, I have one in my sump, but may be moving to a traditional one soon.

[JDM]

i moved from fresh to salt just over 2 years ago, on the advice of the lfs i purchased a cannister filter, in my opnion this is a total waste of money and can cause more halm than good, i ended up wasting huge amounts of money on makedo skimmers which never did the job properly, if i had bit the bullet and got a good skimmer in the begining i would have saved myself a heap of mucking around and headakes not to mention the money. skimmers can be seen as very expensive for what they look like but its not what there made from as much as it is how well they work, i have used nearly all the cheep designs and now have a deltec 1250 the differance in my tank was well worth the money i spent. i have a cheep via aqua hangon skimmer in my qt tank (20gal) and it is nearly a waste of time, it works well when i set it, then a couple of hours later it needs resetting, this is quite oftern the case with cheep skimmers. remember the life we keep in our tanks is not cheep so the equipment we use to provide a healthy home for them should do the best job possable.

in my opnion the skimmer on any tank will define how well that tank will do.

$50 probably wont be enough to get a decent skimmer but if you combine that with the money a cannister filter would cost then that will possiably be enough for a skimmer to suit a 20gal.

good luck, its great fun!

[tang]

wasp,would it be right to say that my wet&dry filter with all those bio balls is uping my nitrate and phos and competing with the live rock ,there is a bit on it in the marine dvd where they took the bio balls out/

[suphew]

wasp,would it be right to say that my wet&dry filter with all those bio balls is uping my nitrate and phos and competing with the live rock ,there is a bit on it in the marine dvd where they took the bio balls out/

Yes for sure, either replace your bioballs and sponges etc with carbon and/or other resins, or remove the cannister. The idea is to remove the waste before it can break down (using a skimmer) running a bio filter just makes it harder to do this because its trapping the waste and breaking it down.

[wasp]

Tang - What Suphew and everyone else said.

Also, the bioballs do not actually "create" nitrate, it's just that they don't get rid of it, which of course allows it to slowly build up in the tank. This is because the surface of a bioball is well saturated with oxygen, but the bacteria that reduce nitrate need a very low oxygen environement to do the job, they cannot do it in a high oxygen environement.

So liverock, which is porous, will have on the surface of it the high oxygen needing bacteria, which will reduce ammonia, and nitrite. Then a layer inside the rock, where oxygen has been depleted, are nitrate eating bacteria. The nitrate is produced at the edge of the liverock, in close proximity to the bacteria that eat it, just inside the liverock, so a lot of it can be consumed immediately. However with bioballs, all nitrate is released into the water. It is then harder for this to be trapped and processed by the bacteria within any rock that is present. So if a tank has a high nitrate problem, simply removing the bioballs, and making no other changes, will usually have a beneficial effect.

This is also the problem with cannisters in a marine tank, the media in the cannister is small and exposed to constant flow, making it a highly oxygenated environment, in which nitrate will not be consumed. Therefore, better no cannister. A cannister may be used for carbon and such, but not for biological filtration, in a marine tank.

Now if cannisters, and wet/dry filters, are so evil, why are they used in fresh tanks? Because the fresh tank does not have corals, which are adversely affected by high nitrate, plus many fresh tanks have a lot of plants, which actually benefit from nitrate.

[tang]

cheers guys

[Rory]

cheers guys

[gregb]

Dont tell the wife just go buy one.