i'm an idiot

[Jeff]

well for the last 8 months i have been battling cyno and algea problems that have kiled most of my sps. i have a dual beckett skimmer that i had to adjust everyday to keep the water in the tube high enough to skim wet and it just didn't seem to be working right. so i have been looking at getting a new skimmer and they all recomend a high gph. then it struck me. my pump from the sump feeds the tank and the skimmer. there is a ball valve after the line feed the skimmer that has been open all the way so that i get the MOST FLOW TO THE TANK AND NOT THE SKIMMER.
i have now adjusted the valve for more flow to the skimmer and now i dont have to adjust the water level. also i am getting more and darker skim mate from the tank. the cyno is getting less and less in the tank so i am on the right track again. I HOPE!

[betiuminside]

LOL...
Good luck... I battle Cyno for 4 months.. and now.. finally it's gone... but it wasn't the skimmer... just a normal tank cycle...

[safeuerwehr]

I had hair algae and cyno that wouldnt go away....after replacing my underpowered skimmer with a life reef the cyano was gone in two weeks and the hair algae is receeding and almost gone......and all my corals are very happy now.....so yeah i would say that effective skimming is the key to problematic algae growth and of course having all your nutrient sources in check...

alfred

[GaryP]

Skimming = nutrient removal

Ineffective skimming = high nutrients

High Nutrients = Nuisance algae growth

Therefore, Ineffective Skimming = Nuisance Algae Growth

The math is pretty simple.

There are also a couple of other things here. Cyano likes low Redox. By fully oxygenating more water, you are increasing the redox. Also, you may not have had enough flow going through the becketts to be pulling an adequate amount of air. I'll let matt or someone that is more knowledgeable about becketts to jump in there. It seems to me that if you have a dual beckett that means you are splitting the flow through both and only gettting half the flow rate. It would seem that you would need to have twice the flow of a single beckett to draw the same amount of air. If you flow rate was the same as a single beckett, then you be cancelling out the benefit of having a double.

On the flip side, doubling the flow means decreasing the retention time in half. As long as this is taken account in the design of the skimmer you should be fine. In other words, you have double the capacity of the skimmer over that of a single beckett.

Matt, please jump in here.