Using reservoir to return skimmed water to tank

[Bilk]

I'm building a new system which will have a 50G tank and a sump of approximately 12G. The general setup most employ and what I had, returned the water from the protein skimmer back to the main sump, mixing it with supply water from the main tank, thus recycling it. The sump is also where dosing takes place. It seems counter intuitive now as the skimming does remove trace elements from the dosing and it also intermingles the fresh makeup water with the unskimmed water.

I was wondering if anyone uses a separate sump for the skimmer to dump the skimmed water into and then pumps this water back to the tank. I'm sure the system can be throttled to balance the input and output from the main tank. And, the second sump can have an overflow that does return water to the filter sump if the flow is too great.

Any thoughts? Any drawbacks? Do you think I can achieve enough turnover from the protein skimmer? Should I oversize the skimmer?

Hope this is all making sense. :hmm6:

[iwishtofish]

I'm a little confused by your question. In this hypothetical, is it your aim to slow the flow through a skimmer chamber in order to ensure all water is "thoroughly skimmed" prior to reintroduction to the main system?

[tkeracer619]

Skimmers don't really remove any trace elements worth mentioning.

They also do just fine in the main sump. They also do not remove 100% of dissolved organic compounds. There is very little difference between skimmed and non skimmed water. It takes many passes to get the DOCS out.

Keep it simple and use the general proven to work setup.

As long as you get a good skimmer you don't need to oversize. An octopus SRO-1000 or XP 1000 would work great.

People pay extra for recirculating skimmers so it can't be an all bad thing.

[Bamm Bamm]

Your trying to make thngs too hard just run it like everyone else stop trying to overthink it..