aeration

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melosu58

SW REEF 20+ YEARS
Joined
Oct 21, 2004
Messages
39,152
Location
Virginia
Like to do a little thread on aeration of a saltwater tank. Does anybody have any links or experiences on increasing aeration of a saltwater tank. Not having any problems just trying to find out more.
 
Can I chime in first?

I think a Surface skimmer helps a lot. Well I am still new here but I can at least see there is a difference in the water surface when there is a surface skimmer present or not.

When I run my tank without the surface skimmer, I can see from under a water through the lighting a thin film on the water surface. This film kind of breaks off at the place where the powerhead is pointed to the surface blowing upwards.

If I use a surface skimmer, no such film exist AT ALL. The surface is crystal clear. Well I am not sure if it helps with aeration but I think cleaner surface do help a little bit. And those surface skimmers are not expensive at all. You can easily hook them up with a small HOB filter just to skim the surface but you can also adjust them to do some under surface filtering as well.

Just my opinion though.
 
skimmers will generally aerate the water plenty on its own IME. Do not, however, use the venturi thing on a lot of powerheads...that will give you salt creep like none other (and same goes for air stones/bubblers...too much salt creap). Also, if you use either of those, you're gonna have bubbles everywhere. Its not like freshwater where the bubbles just go straight up and are used as a visual affect...in a reef tank, theres so much flow that you'd just have scattered bubbles everywhere.
 
IMO surface aggitation is what allows aeration of your tank. All bubbles do is when they rise to the surface and pop causing slight surface aggitation. Just thought someone would have some links or info to verify.
 
IMO surface aggitation is what allows aeration of your tank.
Skimmers do also effect aeration/O2 saturation. After all they inject air directly into a stream of water. Can't get much more agitation than that. Just one of the many positive effects a skimmer has. Adding a sump also helps in that the water being drawn from the tank via the overflow is able to "blow off" excess CO2 on it's way down into the sump. Sumps also use surface skimmers which gets rid of the "scum" that tends to accumulate on the waters surface. That allows for better air exchange.
 
I just have an airline in the tank ensuring that the bubbles it produces are large so they cause a significant surface aggitation effect. That and my skimmer and return line pointing to the surface so it breaks the water surface easily. I don't see any film either.
 
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