How do you deal w/ Water Loss?

[TygGer]

Just trying to figure out an easy way to deal with water loss, not only from evap, but from adding a skimmer to a nano-tank.

With evap, it's easy to just add more fresh water. But the small amount of water loss due to the skimmer will throw the salinity off.

Just wondering how I would know how much more salt water to add? How do you guys deal with this?

 

[DragonForce]

Tweak your skimmer so it skims dry instead of wet.

Also, you could set a small tupperwear above the tank somewhere, use a very small airline tube, then get a small valve to control water flow, or tie a knot in the tubing. Your goal will be to make it drip about 1-2 drops a second, you can adjust till you find a drip ammount that suits your tank. It's a very simple cheap auto top off system. I have about a half gallon tupperwear on top of my hood. I feed an airline tube through the open back. I fill the tupperwear up once a day usually right when I wake up, take a peak into my tank before I hop into the shower.

 

[No_Floaters]

I use a 2 gallon plastic "drinking water" bottle witha spigot for the same thing. I put a piece of tubing in the bottle's spigot with a small plastic valve at the end to drip once per second. I put this on top of my sump so that the spigot on the bottle was at the top and after I started the siphon, it would run until the bottle was empty. It usually lasted about 2 days. Of course, I loose about a gallon a day to evaporation in the 92-gallon.

 

[TygGer]

Im not too worried about evaporation. I'm planning on setting up an autotopoff for that... but it seems like it would be difficult to maintain the exact same salinity when the skimmer is pulling out salt water. The autotopoff would be filling with fresh water and would slowly lower the salinity.

I guess I need to try setting the skimmer to skim dry and maybe I'll just need to add a little salt over time.

 

[Royal Gramma]

I would imagine that the change in salinity from your skimmer is negligable when compared to the change in salinity from a water change. Even if you measure the salt exactly the same way each time you do a water change it still will still vary slightly.

So if you are doing regular water changes you will adjust your salinity slightly as you do them...

And if your not planning regular water changes, you will probably have more to worry about in the long run than a slight fluctuation in salinity.

If I may ask, what will be the total water volume of the nano?

Best Wishes!

Mark

 

[TygGer]

The nano is 10g. It's been running skimmerless for 2yrs now, but I've been having algae problems.

 

[BillyZ]

The nano is 10g. It's been running skimmerless for 2yrs now, but I've been having algae problems.

Have you considered a sump with a refugium? simply adding to the water volume and giving a place to grow some macro algae could help considerably with nutrient export.

 

[TygGer]

Not on this system.

I've been sloooowly working on my 72g tank w/ a 29g sump. Was planning on moving everything out of the nano and converting it to a quarantine tank...

 

[Bearfan]

I just increased my water volume to the point where the skimmer amount collected really doesn't affect anything, but my skimmer runs pretty dry as well.

 

[Brenden]

I have a valve on one of the lines coming out of my RO/DI it drips 24/7. I am scared of a top off unit, plus the water volume I would need would be a pain to keep full. I lose about 6 gallons a day to evaporation.