Skimless tank with live stock and corals

[Firestarter]

Depending on the size of your tank, tanks of smaller volume, running skimmerless is possible however more water change is required.

My 4G pico tank is skimmerless but I change about 0.5-1.5L every 2-3 days.

[rekian]

"Ammonia is toxic to fish. If it is not zero, I would have lost all the fish right?"

Yes they are toxic to living things in the tank, but fishes can tolerate to ammonia to certain levels.

What method do you use to reduce ammonia in your system?

As your UAS mainly take in nitrate and PO4.

Maybe is your regular water change that reduce ammonia. but you only do water change for 2-3 weeks and those high feeding.

How do you achieve zero for ammonia?

ammonia is reduce by bacteria in the live rock/biological filtration. Ammonia is reduce to nitrite then nitrate by these bacteria. Nitrate being the less harmful can be tolerated by fish to a certain level. But with the presence of nitrate, nuisance algae will grow which compete nutrient with the good algae like coraline algae.

[rekian]

Hmm.. wonder how much ppm of ammonia can our noses start detecting?.. certainly a good "quick " test..

Sent from my GT-N7000 using Tapatalk 2

If our nose can detect, it probably means most of the living thing in the tank is dead! Use test kit to test. I only test ammonia during the initial setup. A mature system shouldn't have trace of ammonia.

[qingwen]

kaykay your tank looks great!whats in there? and how you go about doing the skimless thing?

[kaykay]

kaykay your tank looks great!whats in there? and how you go about doing the skimless thing?

Hi qingwen, thanks for your compliments.

In the tank are some fishes, soft corals, and a few heads of LPS corals.

The basic function of a skimmer is to export inorganic waste before they contaminate the tank water.

My skimmerless method uses an underflow algae scrubber, which confines the organic waste in the water at this specific region and utilised by green algae to grow here. You can read more about it here

[kohwhl]

Where can we get this?

[rekian]

Where can we get this?

You can either DIY or get from gemsurf/ DE lighting. Look up the the sponsor section