going skimmerless?

[fishypets]

Good luck to the all of you going skimmerless. I have seen a few tanks with sps and no skimmer, needless to say they were not very impressive. If I had a tank full of zoos and softies I might consider it also but if you are keeping sps a skimmer is a must IMO.

[Richard]

I think tanks can do just fine without a skimmer. Especially mature systems that have been maintained properly.

The thing that is going to make it give very different results for different tanks is that it depends so much on an persons stocking & maintenance & feeding habits. Even more variable will be each systems ability to export/utilize excess nutrients. This will vary depending on things like how functional the sandbed is (mainly infauna variation), type/porosity/ amount of liverock, types of corals, how established the bacterial populations are and types of established bacteria, probably many other things too.

Going skimmerless isn't something I would recommend to the general public because of those different factors but I think many people can get the same or even better results without a skimmer. I think the safe way to do it would be to wean your system off of the skimmer so that it gives your system time to adjust to the higher availability of nutrients.

[loans_n_fishes]

When weaning, do you mean turn off the skimmer for a couple of hours at a time and slowly increase the time it is off?

I am not going to do this yet, but would eventually prefer to filter naturally (with a refugium/live rock etc).

[Richard]

I would turn it off for a day then on for a day. Then off for 2 days on for a day....

By off I mean not skimming but you still need to keep the water flowing through it. Otherwise the water will stagnate and give you big trouble when you turn it back on.

[hobogato]

looks like im joining the skimmerless kick on my frag tank, my berlin skimmer got some carbon pellets in it and after taking it out and cleaning, it is leaking badly, so i may just run that system (on the hiatt method) without a skimmer. the skimmer has been running a "wet" as i could set it for a month now and not produced enough skimmate to cover the bottom of a 1 gallon juice bottle.

[Richard]

Ace - That is a totally different situation though. As long as you meet the four requirements of the Hiatt method you just don't need a skimmer. Actually it should work better without a skimmer since you get a better population of the RN bacteria by not having a skimmer competing with them. Although as you saw they are pretty good about outcompeting the skimmer.

Mark actually had to add organics to get his system working better. He used water from his cichlid tank (N ~100) as top off water LOL. His tank was too clean when he switched over to the torpedos so he had to add more N to get his P down to undetectable. The RN bacteria reduce N & P at a 4:1 ratio.

[brewercm]

From some of the things that I had read about going skimerless one was frequent water changes, and a decent fuge. Just my thoughts, but I run my skimmer very dry so I would suppose in a way it's somewhat the same theory just not to the extreme of total skimmerless. Although my fuge grows macro like nuts (cheato, and razor caulerpa).

[GaryP]

I was just wondering one thing. If going skimmerless was such a good thing, why did everyone go to using a skimmer in the first place when they were first introduced into the hobby?

Forgive my skepticism but this sort of reminds me of trading in a Ferrari for a Model T. Based on the posts here I would have to say that not many people have a problem with too little organics in their system. Quite the opposite. I can see how going skimmerless may have its niche in something like a frag tank with very low nutrients.

One of the other common problems I see here is people starving their fish in order to keep nutrients under control. I'm afraid this will only add to this mentality.

OK, someone made the comment that they would rather spend $200 on livestock then a skimmer. I'll just ask one question. How many buckets of extra salt at $40/ea. would you have to buy, to keep up with the additional water changes, would it take to pay for that skimmer? Just looking at the economics alone makes me think its a pay me now, pay me later situation.

One other issue to consider. Having a skimmer gives you a certain safety factor that going skimmerless doesn't provide. What happens when you have a fish die in your tank that you can't retreive? How is the skimmerless system going to handle that additional organic load? Is losing a prize SPS colony worth saving a few bucks?

I will be the first to admit that a skimmer does have some down sides. A lot of desirable nutrients do get removed with the skimmate. Iodine is one of these. Another factor to consider is that a lot of the gas exchange that occurs in a tank take places in the skimmer. My guess is that a skimmerless system is going to have a higher likelihood of having pH problems as a result.