Save CO2 scrubber media life by recirculating air? | Reef FAQs

[Gogol_frag]

Hi, Roger with Tunze here, so I was sent here by a customer I spoke to at RAP NY. Some years back, a competitor of ours did something we were intrigued by as it simplified skimmer design and reduced cost, they essentially used the skimmer cup as a silencer and took the air from the skimmer cup. We bought one and tested it and found it performed poorly. We had a hunch that the decomposing skimmate created gasses or possibly just the high humidity of the skim mate and popping bubbles was affecting skimming. We tested this by A) taking one of our skimmers and rigging it to draw from the cup and B) taking the competitors skimmer and rigging it to a conventional silencer to take in fresh air. The results were fairly convincing that this is a bad idea. We still don't know why, but by our testing, taking air from the skimmer cup seems to impede skimmer performance. From some cursory research we strongly suspect that methane and sulfur compounds reduce the surface attraction of the bubbles, these large molecules do not lend themselves in the same way to being charged by the ionic soup of saltwater and picking up organic matter as just plain O2 and N2. FWIW, said competitor likely noted the same as they no longer do it this way and we know of no manufacturer who takes air from the skimmer cup though we kept this study a secret as we had no interest in helping someone else improve their products. I would be very interested to know if anyone who has done this has seen less overall skimming as a result.

That's a super interesting perspective Roger. Thank you dear sir!

P.S. we have interacted on emails and on the phone (I am run a sumpless tank and enquired about the availability of Tunze Skimmers) - it's just that my alias here is related but not similar to the name that you know me by.