Tiny bubbles... AquaC. Not micro bubbles... click and see.

[sequential]

Appologies to Don Ho aside, I have a question about the use of an air pump and air stone combination in a marine tank with an AquaC Remora.

Here's the info you need to know first. I have approximately 2.5 lbs LR / gallon in my 37g tall. It's a lot of rock in such a small space, but it's my personal preference. I have a MJ 1200 in the tank and an MJ 1200 in my AquaC Remora, in a prefilter box. The flow is reasonable in the tank, but I may add more because the prefilter box doesn't do a terribly good job of distributing the water movement. There are a couple of deadish spots, one in particular that the clean up crew can't get to. In that spot, I put a tiny air stone and connected it to a air pump. It seems to work as a temporary solution and the engineer gobies just adore swimming in BUBBLES!

However, I read that the skimmers work as a function of surface tension. This may sound silly, but do bubbles from an air stone adversely affect the functioning of the skimmer by altering the surface tension somehow?

Second, is there an optimum temperature for the functioning of a skimmer? I understand that the warmer the water is, the lower the surface temperature, but I am unclear as to what my target surface tension should be. I keep the tank in question at about 78 degrees.

Thanks for your thoughts.

[sequential]

I'd have thought, given the number of skimmer advocates on RC, that this questions would have at least sparked a single answer. :D

Is it that dumb of a question?

[chip721]

I don't think it's a dumb question at all. I have a Remora and was interested to see some of the reponses. Generally speaking, most folks don't add an airstone to their reef. But I recall reading some mods where it was actually suggested adding an airstone inside a skimmer. IMO, unless this airstone is directly under the Remora's MJ1200 intake, I doubt it will affect the skimmer's performance much. Your temp is fine. Try to minimize large swings. Are you having specific problems with the Remora? I wouldn't hesitate to contact Aqua-C directly. They have good tech/customer support.

[bertoni]

I would set the temperature of the tank to suit the animals, not the skimmer. I target 82 F. I don't think that the temperature is going to affect skimming significantly in the useful range for a reef tank.

The bubbles from the airstone won't hurt the skimmer performance any, and won't affect surface tension. Adding an airstone is a common trick to improve the performance of skimmers, actually.

Responding to your own thread takes you off the unanswered list.

[sequential]

Responding to your own thread takes you off the unanswered list.

I have no idea what this means, but I assume I did something bad. :( Sorry about that.

Thanks for your replies.

[bertoni]

No, not bad.

The forum software provides a way to look for posts with no responses, which usually means an unanswered question. So I do the search from time to time, as do others.

[sequential]

Thanks. That's good to know for future reference.