Here’s another great question I got today about combining multiple filtration methods

on one aquarium (a reef system).  Here’s the question and my answer:

QUESTION:  “Warren did I understand you to say that you like to use multiple filtration methods on one aquarium? Like aJaubert plenum with a deep sand bed in the display tank with a mud filter refugium in the sump with return water flowing thru a uv. This is exactly what I would like to do on my new 135 gal reef tank. What are your thoughts on this combo???”

ANSWER:  So, to answer your question about if I like using multiple filtration methods on one aquarium, my answer is no – and I’ll explain.

Do I think it’s a good idea to use a Jaubert plenum in your exhibit tank with a mud filter refugium in the sump, along with a UV?  Yes that could work well.

Overall, my philosophy is that while there are many different methods or filtration formats for a successful reef tank, you generally want to pick one and stick with it.  In other words, you don’t want to install an algae scrubber, with a protein skimmer along with a living sponge filtration system and a UV sterilizer and a trickle filter and live rock (I think you get the idea).  The different components that are used for one method may counteract other component from a different method.  And what you end up with is a mess that doesn’t work, and has chronic water quality problems.

For example, a UV sterilizer would kill off any water borne bacteria and phytoplankton and would thus partly starve a living sponge filter.  Or using an aggressive protein skimmer with a living sponge filter system would not work, as the protein skimmer would starve the live sponge of its food source.

Or another example would be the use of bioballs/trickle filter in combination with an algae scrubber.  The bioballs/trickle filter would add to the chronic nitrate levels that the algae scrubber or refugium is designed to reduce.

So, yes it’s OK to combine a Jaubert plenum in the exhibit tank with a refugium/mud filter in the sump, along with a UV sterilizer.  Just don’t go overboard trying to install every known form of filtration into your system.

I’ve seen a public aquariums do this with their 1,000 gallon reef tank (this was years ago) and the exhibit was a nightmare to operate – plus it didn’t look anywhere near as good as it should have at the time.

Also, with your Jaubert plenum, you may likely find that depending on how large your calcium/magnesium demand is, that you may need to supplement for calcium and magnesium (alkalinity too).

I only have a little experience with Jaubert plenum systems, but did research them aggressively years ago when they began to become popular.  What are you hearing/learning about their effectiveness?

Leave a comment here and let me know what filtration method you are using and what your experience has been.

And keep the questions coming!

Technorati Tags: bioballs, Jaubert, mud system, plenum, reef tank, refugium, salt water aquarium, saltwater aquarium, U.V. sterilizer

If you ask most people what words come to mind when they think of saltwater aquariums, most of them will eventually mention “complicated”, “difficult”, or “a lot of work”. And – yes – saltwater aquariums ARE inherently complicated. BUT, they don’t have to be difficult or overwhelming or “a lot of work”. What if it were simple, easy and fun? What if it could be this way for you?

Well, I am here to tell you it can be. I don’t like to toot my own horn, but if there is one thing I am good at, it is taking things that are inherently complex and making them simple. In fact, if you are going to be both successful at saltwater aquariums AND have fun doing it, you must learn to keep it simple or simplify.

When people ask me what does it take to make a great saltwater aquarium I tell them that it is as simple as this:

1. If you put stuff in, you have to take stuff out – otherwise you end up with pollution.  Another way of saying it is that in order to prevent accumulation of bad stuff (nitrates, phosphates, organics, detritus, waste, etc.)  you need to always be removing it.  There are many ways to accomplish this, such as:  water changes; activated carbon, protein skimmer, refugium w/ macro-algae, water changes, phosphate-removing media, etc..
2. Stop and just stare at your tank regularly – few skills are more crucial to a successful saltwater aquarium than observation.  Observation is absolutely foundational to your success.  And the good thing is it is really easy to do.  Just stand and stare, and do it on a regular basis.  You will learn more, discover more, prevent more problems and come up with more solutions by just getting quiet and still and just watching your tank.
3. Become a learning and reading maniac and ask lots of questions.  Learn as much as you can about the animals you are keeping and have a strong sense of wonder – Whether it is animals or filtration equipment, it is vitally important that you learn as much as you can about them.  Let’s face it, this part takes a while, and yet there is no way around it, unless you are going to hire someone to take care of your tank for you, which may be an option for you.  You will need to learn about their life history, ecology, husbandry requirements and compatibility with other potential tank mates.  And filtration equipment or life support equipment must be understood in order to select the right one and to operate it properly.  So read as much as you can (books, magazines, online forums, blogs), join a local saltwater aquarium hobby club, attend seminars, workshops and lectures, and above all be open-minded.  Know you can never know everything, and be willing to be contributed to.  Be willing for the other guy to know more than you, so that you can learn something new (this alone has taken me very far).
4. Be consistent and keep a routine – There is no beating around the bush.  Saltwater aquariums require consistent routine care, and if you skimp on your consistency or miss a day or a week here and there, it can come back to bite you.  Tropical coral reef thrive with consistent conditions,  and your saltwater aquarium is no different.  You must be regular and consistent with your saltwater aquarium maintenance routine.  I have seen amazing tanks whose only difference from mediocre ones was that their routine was amazingly thorough and consistent.  The bottom line is that saltwater aquariums need regular attention.
5. Prevention, Prevention, Prevention – The saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is alive and well with keeping saltwater aquariums.  To the degree that you focus on preventing problems with your saltwater aquarium, you will be more successful.  This is an area I have been forced to become very good at as the owner of Gibbons Aquaria, Inc., a high-end custom saltwater aquarium design/installation/management company.  With multiple customers and multiple tanks (most of which are more than several hundred gallons) my business and my customers cannot afford too many problems.  And to be frank, saltwater aquariums require good problem solving skills.  Even if you are wildly successful, you will still have your share of surprises, such as mechanical failures, leaks, disease outbreaks, animal aggression/mortality, etc..  All of these unpleasant things are going to happen to you eventually, no matter how good you are.  The key is to prevent, minimize and respond to them so that they don’t cause big problems for you.  In other words, if a pump stops working and you don’t even know it, you can lose your entire tank.  Or even if you notice in time that the pump has stopped working but you don’t have a spare, you are in trouble.  So prevent problems in the first place.  Minimize them when they do happen.  And then set yourself up with some kind of monitoring system to notify you so that you can respond when they do happen.
6. Be like a boyscout and be prepared – Preventing problems is one thing (and it’s absolutely huge), and being prepared for problems is different.  If you can afford it, keep spares of as many critical life support components as possible (pumps, light bulbs for reef tanks, heater, etc.).  Also, part of being prepared is making sure you know that problems are going to happen and design your aquarium setup to accommodate them.  An example of this would be to make sure system fails “safe” in the event of a power failure.  This means that your sump will not overflow or your system is capable of starting back up without you needing to be there when the power comes back on.  Another example is to have your aquarium notify you of key life support failures when they happen by using a monitoring system (I love the Sensaphone 400 and Sensaphone 800).
7. Become a critical thinker and ask lots of “why” and “how” questions – It is vitally important that as you learn, that you actually understand what you are learning and why the thing you are learning is so.  The opposite of this is like kids in school who just want the teacher to tell them what’s going to be on the exam.  Just learning the answer won’t help you if you don’t actually understand why it is the answer.  In fact, this failed approach leads to more problems whereby you are mystified and confused, but now with even more problems that you don’t understand.
8. Move lots of water – Proper water circulation can be almost magical in its beneficial impact on a saltwater aquarium.  Here are some of the benefits of proper water circulation:  helps keep detritus and other waste up in the water column so that it can be removed by filters; helps increase oxygen levels and reduce carbon dioxide, brings nutrients to corals and invertebrates, provides ideal respiration for all animals and plants, acts as a treadmill for fish to get exercise, allows for better density of coral skeletons,  helps create more natural coral growth forms, increased coral growth rate, etc..
9. Lighting:  The proper quantity and quality of light – Simply put, you need enough of the right type of light.  One rule of thumb for reef aquariums with photosynthetic corals is to use 2.5-4 watts of lighting per gallon of aquarium.  So if your tank is 70 gallons and you want to keep stony corals, you will want to be at the upper end – at 4 watts per gallon.  So if we do the math:  4 watts x 70 gallons = 280 watts of  lighting.  A fish-only aquarium only requires enough lighting for aesthetic benefit -  about 1/4 of the wattage per gallon.
10. Build it fail-safe – It is one thing for bad things to happen with your saltwater aquarium.  But what if something bad happened (like a power failure) but no bad consequences came of it.  This is what happens when you design and build your aquarium’s life support system to fail safe.  For example, the aquariums I install and maintain can easily accommodate power failure, pump failure, leaks, overheating/cooling, and unwanted changes in water levels.  All of these can happen without any negative consequences to the tank and its inhabitants, because it was built to fail safe.
11. Water quality rules:  If you don’t have good water quality, nothing else you do will matter - Test the following water quality parameters once a week and graph your results so you can track trends over time (pH, salinity, alkalinity, calcium, magnesium, nitrates, and phosphates).
12. Disease is always present, so use a ultraviolet sterilizer - Since there is always disease in every aquarium all the time, use an ultraviolet sterilizer (U.V. sterilizer) to help prevent an outbreak.  Your fish and corals can live happily with a chronic low level of parasites, as can we humans.  But when stress levels increase in your aquarium (for whatever reason), disease can spread quickly and is difficult to get back under control once an outbreak occurs.  Thus, a U.V. sterilizer prevents such a thing from happening and in my opinion is mandatory as part of your saltwater aquarium’s life support system
13. Prevent stress and you will significantly lessen the occurrence of disease, aggression and deaths.  Just like in humans, stress is accumulative – even for fish and corals and other invertebrates.

Technorati Tags: aquarium lighting, easy aquarium, reef tank, saltwater aquarium, saltwater aquariums, U.V. sterilizer, ultraviolet sterilizer, water movement, Water Quality

I am shocked and surprised how often I come across marine aquariums (reef or fish only) that have no U.V. sterilizer filter.  These aquarists are playing Russian rulette with their aquariums, running the risk of being vulnerable to a parasite outbreak. 

There are many different situations that can cause a disease and/or parasite outbreak in your marine aquarium.  It could be adding new fish, or perhaps one of your fish changes sex and throws off the entire pecking order, or a fish dies or is removed and that throws off the pecking order; or say your chiller (if you have one) went on the fritze during a heat wave – and the list goes on. 

And given that there are so many situations that could spark a disease or parasite outbreak, wouldn’t you want to protect yourself (and your fish) against this likely possibility?  Who wouldn’t?  And yet many aquarists don’t have a U.V. sterilizer on their system.  It’s like rolling the dice and crossing your fingers, hoping you don’t have a disease outbreak. 

So, before I go any further, let me just say that  -  yes – you deffinitely need a U.V. sterilizer.  That is, if you want your fish to live for years rather than months, and if you want to avoid even the possibility of a total system meltdown (scary scientific term).  Yes, this is my opinion, but it is also backed up with over 11 years in keeping saltwater fish (primarily reef tanks) with only three disease outbreaks – and two of them were caused by human error.  By disease outbreak, I mean multiple fish dying from parasite infestation.  This is attributed to aggressive use of U.V. sterilizer filters.  And don’t forget, I’m not talking about just one tank.  I run a high-end custom aquarium design, installation and maintenance business, where we service many customers with large saltwater aquariums.

So, yes, it’s a bold statement.  And it also happens to be true.  See – I don’t like problems or surprises when it comes to aquariums.  Over the years of running my business, I have had to develop ways of preventing problems from even being able to happen on our customer’s tanks; and then having designed the system to be prepared to accomodate the problem if it ever does happen.  This is sort of our company philosophy to aquarium system design and it is a preventative approach designed to prevent problems – so that we put far less energy into reacting to and fixing problems.  Any way – enough of that.  Back to U.V. sterilization.

By now, you might be thinking “yeah right – I don’t beleive you”.  Well, I’m not saying that we’ve only seen parasites on some of our fish three times in 11 years.  NOPE.  We see low-levels of parasites on fish fairly often – but those fish are thriving and healthy and live long lives - typically for over five years, and are able to fight off the parasites.  AND the parasites are not alloud to bloom to dangerous levels because the U.V. sterilizer kills the parasites when they are water born (verses dormant in the substrate) and looking for a host.

So, what is a U.V. sterilizer filter?  The U.V. stands for ultraviolet sterilization.  Basically, it contains a special light bulb which emits U.V. “C” light.  U.V. “C” is the band of U.V. light that gives us sun burn.  So, essentially, a U.V. sterilizer filter is “sun-burning-to-death” (scientific term) or sterilizing your aquarium water as it passes through the filter, and thus killing any water-born parasites.  It runs 24/7 and is very cheap to operate and can PREVENT parasite outbreaks.  What aquarist wouldn’t want to be able to prevent a parasite outbreak?  This is why having a U.V. is a no brainer MUST HAVE filter for your aquarium.

In addition, the U.V. filter will prevent bacteria blooms (caused by water-born bacteria – milky or cloudy water) and phytoplankton blooms (cause of green water).  The result here is clear water.  Of course, this doesn’t remove the underlying cause of the bacteria bloom (excess organics and insufficient bio-filtration) which must still be dealt with.

Sizing is probably the most important factor when selecting your U.V. sterilizer for your aquarium.  My general advice is to slightly oversize your U.V..  Most sizing charts are based on aquarium/system volume.  The last thing you want is an undersized U.V., because then it is almost useless (i.e. it is too small to prevent disease outbreaks).  Several parameters to consider are system/tank volume, water flow rate through the U.V. filter, and bio-load (how much life is in your tank).   So again, when selecting your U.V. sterilizer, choose the next one  up in size, as recommended on the sizing chart.

Example:  If your aquarium is 100 gallons and the sizing chart recommends a 30watt UV for a 90g and a 40watt UV for a 120g, then go with the 40watt UV.

One of the primary criteria used in sizing a U.V. sterilizer is the water flow rate through the unit.  See, if you send too much water (too high of a flow rate) through too small of a unit, then it won’t be effective in killing the parasites.  But for me (I’m lazy), that is too much work, calculating flow rates, etc., so what I do is take the manufacturers recommended sizing for my aquarium (gallons) and then choose the next larger size U.V..  This almost ensures that your U.V. will be effective in killing water-born parasites in your aquarium and preventing a disease outbreak.  And nine times out of ten, if you do the calculations of water flow rate, UV kill rate, and total system volume, you will end up at the same size U.V. any way.  One caviat here – this method is based on average bio-loading (average number of fish/invertebrates etc.) for any given tank volume.  So if you are crazy aggressive with your stocking density of fish/corals/invertebrates/etc., then you may even want to choose a U.V. that is two sizes up.

Of course, U.V. is not the only effective way to sterilize against disease and parasites.  Ozone is very effective if applied and monitored properly.  But Ozone is far less forgiving than U.V., and while you cannot CAUSE any problems by oversizing a U.V. filter, you can cause BIG PROBLEMS by improperly applying and monitoring ozone.  But more about ozone in future posts.  For now, suffice it to say that U.V. is very safe and simple to apply to your aquarium filtration system, and there is no monitoring (unlike ozone).

You do need to ensure proper upkeep or maintenance of your U.V. sterilizer.  Once a year, you must change the bulb and the O-ring and/or gasket, and clean off the quartz sleeve (housing the bulb).  This may take 30 minutes to an hour to do, but is necessary because after a year of operation, the bulb has begun to lose its potency and the ozone gas produced by some U.V. bulbs will break down the O-ring and/or gaskets that seal off the quartz sleeve.  And in some systems the quartz sleeve can accumulate mineral deposits that may reduce effectiveness of the U.V. bulb.  A simple overnight vinegar bath and wipedown with a sponge will do the trick.

Generally, I’m not big on having opinions.  I like to be open-minded, and opinions tend to cut us off from being open to learning something new.  But when something works as well and as consistently as this does, well, I feel strongly about it.  The proof is in the pudding, as they say.  I hope this is of help to you.

Warren Gibbons

Technorati Tags: disease, ozone, parasite, Prevantative Design, U.V., U.V. sterilizer