Skimming

[jamiep]

I've heard of over skimming, is this a pile of crap or how much is too much?

[jsr]

Depends on what you plan to keep. I have a 135G FOWLR and run an Octopus NW200. I would reather have more skimmer then not enough. That way, I can add more livestock without having to worry about my skimmer being undersized for the load.

[kraze3]

I over skim on my smaller tank. I have a CSS 125 on a 29 gal. I also have a somewhat large bioload

[CruzinKim]

You can't overskim a tank, I don't think. Once the skimmer removes everything, there's nothing else to skim. It may skim out a few good things.

But you install an efficient skimmer to big in capacity, it may not work as well as one that that matches your setup. The oversized skimmers that are high performers cannot form a good foamhead when there's not enough organics in the water. Whereas, the next size down, will keep skimming even when there very little waste in the water. There's a lot of debate on this, but I've read a lot of owners owning up to this truth, that for high performance skimmers, it's not good to oversized.

[USC-fan]

I wouldn't worry about it. I ran a DAS ex-2 on a 30gal tank ;)

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10896379#post10896379 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by CruzinKim
You can't overskim a tank, I don't think. Once the skimmer removes everything, there's nothing else to skim. It may skim out a few good things.

But you install an efficient skimmer to big in capacity, it may not work as well as one that that matches your setup. The oversized skimmers that are high performers cannot form a good foamhead when there's not enough organics in the water. Whereas, the next size down, will keep skimming even when there very little waste in the water. There's a lot of debate on this, but I've read a lot of owners owning up to this truth, that for high performance skimmers, it's not good to oversized. Are you talking about the BM again? Because this is not true for all skimmer designs. Specially recir-NW were you can control the dwell time.....

[bertoni]

The effects of a skimmer will depend on the animals in the system. Some prefer more nutrient-laden water, others (like Acropora) like very clean water. A larger skimmer tends to reduce nutrient levels, up to some unknown point.

There's a lot of guessing involved in skimming, in any case, since there's no useful objective data on the performance of the various models. Personally, I'd take into consideration the cost and the likelihood of upgrading the tank size as the higher priorities when making this choice.