Ozone

[wesheltonj]

Is anyone here using Ozone? I just bought one (ozotech) and any tips would be nice.

[Bill S]

I have 2. One is still in the box, an ultrazone. It has a broken bulb - and it's still waiting for MD to pick it up - from JUNE. I'm guessing it's mine now...

My Red Sea unit just died. It was from June as well. They have a reputation for lasting about a year - mine's only 8 or 9 months old. Now I have to dig up the receipt for it...

Anyway, make sure you have a controller for it. You don't want to nuke your tank. Ozone eats up just about anything that runs through it. As far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't waste money on it gain. But that's just me. I bought one because Bob Fenner told me I should.

[wesheltonj]

My GHL will control it and the unit has a lifetime warrenty (whatever lifetime is). More interested in how much to run the thing and best level without nuking the tank. Using UV now.

[Bill S]

Mine is a 200mg unit. I can run full time, and not get too high. Bob said 300mg units can run on a 200g tank and not nuke it. Not sure I'd do THAT, but...

I'd start it at about 1/2 the power (if it's adjustable), and work up. I look at it kind of like a heater - I don't want one big enough that if it gets stuck on, it kills my tank.

[tcinaustin]

I just bought the Red Sea Aquazone deluxe 200mg about a month ago on the advice of Fenner also. Here is what I have done so far on my 185 gal DT (225 Gal sys) hopefully you won't deal with the same problems I had.

To begin with I am introducing ozone through my bubble king SM250 skimmer; it has an ozone port on the volute on the pump next to the air hose. I also have an ozone reactor that I have not played with yet. I have been told it makes a difference whether the ozone is added via a reactor or skimmer though I haven't figured out what that differnce is since I have not played with the reactor yet.

My ORP was 125 to start. I followed the dosing I found on the web and in the Aquazone manual, 5-15 mg/hr per 25 gallons for my 225 gal system which was 45-135mg/hr so I started at 80mg/hr. Well this completely shut down my skimmer . . . just fluffy white bubbles and no skimmate for a week. The next week included an algae bloom and the little bit of hair algae I had exploded all over the tank. ORP dropped to 64. After some feedback on RC, I lowered it to 50 mg/hr and still no skimmate. I was advised to leave it a week which I did and the algae bloom continued and I got to spend the next Sunday pulling hair algae out of the tank. The feedback after this was the ozone is breaking everything down too small to skim out. So I lowered it again to 20 mg/hr and I started to see improvements in the ORP, it went up to 200 in the first couple of days and the best part was I started getting skimmate again. ORP hit about 315 on the high end and dropped back down to 260 after that.

Right now, I am at 12 mg/hr and ORP is about 280. The hair algae is at least not growing noticeably after scrubbing rocks over the weekend. This is where I am at now. The next steps are to hopefully stabilize everything to see what impact it will have over a few months. I am certainly not an expert and am open to feedback if someone has the magic figured out already.