Does this make sense?

[MizTanks]

This reason was given as to why I don't want a larger skimmer on my tank. Is this true?


The main reason it's not good to have an oversized skimmer is that it wont produce enough skim to come over the neck if it's too big. I recently did a little experiment on my tank setup. I have been running a reef octo 160 diablo for a long time, I went ahead and tested running 2 of them. The result was that it was too much skimmer, neither produced any amount of skim to go up and over the top of the neck. I shut one down and the other started doing good again.
It is really about the neck size more than anything. So running a big skimmer on a small volume of water doesn't overclean the water, it has to wait until the water is dirty enough to produce enough waste to overcome the size of the neck.
Ideally a perfect setup for a tank would be 2 skimmers, one the right size and a smaller one. Once the big one stops pushing foam over the top due to the absence of dissolved organics the little one would kick on and it would be able to clean more. Or a magical skimmer would sense when it stops producing and tighten up the neck size. These don't exist yet but it would work great i bet.
So when choosing a skimmer look at the neck size and amount of water it skims to match your water volume and stocking level. 30 gallons total volume even heavily stocked would want a 60-100 gph pump, and no larger then about 3" neck size. Myself i would probably go with a 1.5 to 2"



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