yellowhead eel
- Thread starter savannah_az
- Start date
Great, so far my thought process is overflow straight under the house to a 3 buckets. bucket 1 mech filtration, bucket 2 algae scrubber, bucket 3 drip plate and scrubbies (wet dry ish), and into a 30 gallon tote of live rock, as much as i can fit. and point on putting a small container with sand to make a make-shift dsb an a submersible pump back up. any foreseen issues?
Seems like it would work as long as you make sure the 30 doesn't overflow when you unplug the pump. Also, in my opinion a skimmer would pay for itself in saved salt for water changes in a predator tank.
i see a lot of back and forth of a skimmer vs an algae scrubber though, do you feel the skimmer would be the better option?
I personally do feel the skimmer is more important, but there are probably just as many who feel the other way. The ATS removes a lot of needed minerals along with nitrates and phosphates, so if you go overboard within you could have to dose. Best scenario is to run both a skimmer and an undersized ATS in my opinion.
Personally i only added a skimmer on my tank because i got a good deal on one. My fimbriated was in a 90gal 48x18x18 with a small powerhead and two Emperor 400's with weekly 30% waterchanges, tons of liverock and minimal sand. These species dont really require alot of hardware to be happy as long as your keeping ontop of maintenece.
Well my problem is i went to big to fast without the proper knowledge about 10 years ago on my salt tank. True disaster, mainly because of hair and cyan algae. Now I'm keeping freshwater without a single spot of algae, fantastic water quality and i really want to recreate that in the salt tank and not make the same mistakes i made before. However looking back, I'm pretty sure my problem was not enough live rock, not NEARLY enough actually. So that being said i guess I'm just paranoid of deja vu. Also looking to minimize water changes to keep the salt cost down "obviously", and yes, I'm aware i can't avoid water changes for ever for obvious reasons but that doesn't mean i can't try to prolong the time between them while keeping parameters in good standing. So that my goal here.
