[philip711]

I just recived the Remora hang on skimmer, its on my 55 gallon, its been on for 12 hours and already pulling out a dark brown Liq from the tank,i have a couple of questions. Does the skimmer pull out essential trace elements? and should these elements be put back in? and what are they?
Thanks very much.

[SPasse]

philip711,

First of all, WELCOME TO REEFLAND.

This is one of those TBD issues.

Skimmers do remove certain beneficial organic elements, such as iodine.

But qualifying just how much of a given element is removed by a given skimmer/system combination is pretty impractical.

Also the various biological and chemical processes that take place in a reef tank also use up various elements at independent rates.

Foods and top off water add elements to a system, and more reef tanks are probably screwed up by going “additive happy” as opposed to systems suffering from lack of nutrients.

Most reef keepers simply add CA and alkalinity buffers and let feeding and small partial water changes take care of the rest of the “additive requirements”

Regards,

Scott

[Ironreef]

with regular w/c and daily feedings i would only worry about calcium,alk and ph. Keep these up to par.