• Looking to buy a cephalopod? Check out Tomh's Cephs Forum, and this post in particular shares important info about our policies as it relates to responsible ceph-keeping.

Tank is operational!!

I have a very similar one. Lately the skimmate is absolutely foul. It is thick, green, foamy and the smell gags me. It works like a charm, my favorite to date.

Heed D's warning about the O-ring. Sometimes it comes off with the cup, sometimes it stays on. Be aware of where it is or you'll be very sorry.
 
WOW!! HAHA, Thanks you guys! Great! I knew my hard earned money would be spent well :smile: I did over rate it gallon wise, the LFS manager told me that coral life under rates their skimmers... idk the truth in this couldnt fin anything on that.. but i do know that they have 3 sizes. 65g, 125g, and 220g and he told me and i also noticed looking at them online that the 125g and 220g system are identical??!!!!!?? The pumps are rated at the same flow of 500gph and he told me he stopped carrying the bigger unit because they were the same and the 220g was like $40 more? Anyways im hoping to get it set up tomorrow, hopefully i will get you some more pics to check out :smile: If not it will be at the beggining of the week next week.
 
Be aware of where it is or you'll be very sorry.
Especially if you have a dog named chewy :wink: (fortunately, we have only had close calls and have not had to replace one. I keep meaning to find where I can get a spare though as it is a sneaky piece of rubber.

IMO, this skimmer is rated about right, however, most others in this price range are way overrated. I have seen reports that the largest in the group does not perform as well as the two smaller ones (we have two of the middle sized one) but I have not tried it.
 
I noticed on a seperate thread about Thales Bandensis at the Academy you mentioned something about cuttles taking more preparation and modifying to take care of. Are you speaking of the nursery part of housing them? And the constant live food they must eat until a certain age? Or have i been missing something about the levels of difficulty between Octopus and Cuttlefish :frown:
 
Btw, i hope a Cuttle pro will chim in sooner than later about the Chromis and Damsels recently added, Becuase if there isnt confidence that they will just be easy food when the time comes. Before i set up the rock work for the time being, "perminant", and "held" together, i will need to get them out of necessary. I mean by no means do i want to keept these fish, or attached to them in anyway. I simply put them in to assist the cycle, and help build the biolgical filtration part of it. I have never tried to sell fish back to a LFS... Im kinda nervous about how that will go over! ha! Especially since these are "junk" fish anyways!.. (Sorry for anyone reading this who likes damsels, but i dont at all.. :smile:..) So thoughts or comments on this would be appreciated also. Because of course ive been reading and im hoping to release the cuttles into the main tank from the nursery after about a month? Pending size? And what i have been getting them to eat at the time.
 
IMO, nix the fish. Hatchling cuttles are tiny, it would be months before they could defend themselves and fish are not the best diet for cephs. Bandensis will never be as large as Hajar's Ramses is right now as they only grow to between 4 and 6 inches. Instead of fish, I recommend that your develop your clean-up crew while you are cycling and feed them heavily. I am more of a critter person than a fish fanatic (I do have a 5 fish but three are in the anemone tank and two are in the reef. I never put them in with cephs). There are interesting animals that you can add that will either survive your cuttles or become safe food. Serpent stars (avoid the green ones), brittle stars (I am very fond of the red ones), cucumbers (stay with Caribbean, the fancy ones will likely nuc your tank, avoid the apple altogether, small crabs (emeralds have a chance of survival but only a chance, however they will help with algae during your first year), shrimp (don't get expensive ones, they will ultimately become food), hermit crabs and snails can all be interesting. With effort, most serpent/brittle stars will learn to be hand fed if you enjoy interacting.
 
I get all of my animals from the ocean, but back when I bought things from fish stores it was a universally accepted practice to "sell" fish back to the fish store. The store typically gives you half of the purchase price, but they give you store credit, not cash. They make out like bandits because, if you assume a 100% mark up on everything they sell, they have to spend twice as much to buy the same fish from their distributor as they spend to buy it from you, and that's only if you use the store credit, and don't move away or quit the hobby before you use your store credit. Don't feel weird about it, they love "buying" your fish. If the fish looks sick or is something they don't think they'll be able to resell, then they'll probably say no, but otherwise they'll snap it up.
 
Horrible news for me.. :sad: So i am running on 4 hours of sleep and have to work from 6pm-6am tonight. I woke up at 10 and was working on setting up the protein skimmer recently bought, and after some time setting it up and getting things figured out adn plugging it in, to my suprise is doesnt work... Its too big of a system.:sad: I do not have enough inlet flow from the overflow to the refugium into the wetdry. The pumps are rated at 500gph.. and the inlet couldnt keep up with the pump, so the sump part of the wetdry was being sucked dry from the return pump because as the water level in the 1st compartment was lower than that of the drip tray i was getting no water back. I also put the outlet from the protien skimmer pump to dump back into the 1st compartment rather than the sump, and the water inlet still couldnt keep up with that massive pump. I am alittle frustrated :mad: I have decided and and hoping for the 65g system by the same coral life super skimmer will work. Simply going to a smaller model. I have confidence from what you guys say and reading about them, that it will be just fine. It is also in fact a 350gph rated pump, and a smaller unit as a whole so more room to work in the stand.. Please, please, PLEASE will the experienced members chim in about this :biggrin2: I am worried that nothing will work for me at this point and am really upset. I dont have alot of room to upgrade my filtration system. Unfortunatly when i set the tank up the 1st time i ever did i built it for the fish and later reef tank i was going to build. I am using the same system obviously to have cut cost in the long run and to get started. This may sound bad but try and trust me when i say, i always was impressed and had luck with it when it was set up years ago! So i just wanted to run the same system without upgrading and spending that extra money on top of all the other expenses. I mean i think that makes sense to use what you already have... Especially if its still good and has been trustworthy and has performed in the past. :biggrin2:
Thanks so much guys.
I will probably be on all night to try and stay awake here at work :biggrin2: Lots of reading to do!!!
 
Can you fit the skimmer pump into the area that receives the water from the tank? Many people feel that skimming the raw water is best (by nature of most of my setup's I skim after my initial filtration though). If you can fit the pump in that section, you can either return to the same section or over the wetdry, I think. The unit I have can be set up in or out of sump but we did not realize that it would turn in the housing for a long time (failure to RTFM :biggrin2: and ultimately we discovered it out of necessity).
 
I can't understand from your description what the problem is, but my best guess is that the pump that runs your skimmer moves more water than your return pump does, AND that you have your skimmer getting water from one compartment, and outputting it into a different compartment, causing your skimmer pump to run dry. Is that correct? If so, the easy solution is to cause your skimmer to dump water into the same compartment from which it draws water. That way, some of the water will be skimmed twice before it leaves the compartment, but that's not a problem, and maybe some water gets past without being skimmed at all, which would happen anyway if your return pump moved more water than your skimmer pump. If you have it set up where the skimmer empties into the next compartment, even if your return pump moved more water then your skimmer pump, you could never turn off your return pump without turning off your skimmer pump too. I think that's a risky design.

Can you provide us with a drawing of your system, and maybe a better description of the problem (maybe after you get some sleep :smile:)?
 
D, to answer your question that is where i wanted it. I experimented with putting it different places and tried different things. I am going to get creative in alittle bit here at work when i have some more time, and draw youu guys a picture trying to be as detailed as possibly and they should be pictured asap.
 
Joe-ceph, to answer your question, you are pretty much exactly correct... yes. I will draw a pic like i said in alittle bit to help illustrate the problem. This should be fun! Lol! I want to give you a heads up though that i tried all these things and had no luck with them :frown: Moving the skimmer return from the return sump to the 1st compartment to try and help the intake to keep up with the protein pump. and it still wasnt enough to fill the campartment to overflow into the tray, bioballs, and sump... :frown::frown: I was really upset but sitting here reading and watching movies has calmed me down! Venting to you guys helps too! Haha
Thanks alot guys! pics soon
 
Also, i mentioned something about my concern for the 65g model vs. the 125g model becuase i wasnt sure the 65 gallon could handle my tank. My LFS manager seems to think it would have been prefect, and he was the one that i mentioned said they under-rate there skimmers. He said that it could possibly skim a 100g-120g tank???? Im not so sure about that... but i think i would be confident to run it for my tank now. And even with a Ceph bio load. I called him today and the earliest i can bring it back is Tuesday to exchange it with the smaller model. I explained and he said it was fine, and he was sorry it didnt work out for me, and he hopes i have better luck with the 65g model.
 

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