Thinking about ozone and need advice

[Cabinetman]

so I have a 600 gallon fish only tank that is heavily stocked. My main filtration is A fairly large pool sand filter and I also use a few curve 9 skimmers. For the most part my water is pretty clear as the pool sand filter does a good job but I want crystal clear water and I'm starting to think ozone is my way to go. I hate complicated stuff. So I'm hoping someone can Tell me it will be ok (Paul b) to just run an airstone in my display. I read that's what you used to do Paul... if not what's the proper way to do this and what breeed of ozinator and other equipment would you guys recomend. I'm extremely handy with making stuff so I don't mind making some stuff to make it less expensive. Looking forward to hearing from you users too. Is it really worth it? One more bit of info. My display has a canopy over it which is directly vented to the outside. So no worries of ozone gettkbg into my living space if I dosed it right to the tank. I also have an airstone in the display now. The fish seam to be amused by it so I leave it for them to play in the bubbles. And tank is 560 gallon and 125 sump. Thanks guys!

 

[Dogtown]

Ive been running an ozotech Poseidon 200 for a couple of months now. It really does a fine job of polishing the water. It’s clearer than runnning a pound of fresh new carbon everyday.

I got a bacterial bloom from over feeding recently. Cranked up the ozone on high and it cleared out in hours. You won’t be disappointed.

I spoke will paul b about his ozone setup and he thinks his diy skimmer is key. It is something like 4-6 ft tall. so large in fact that all of the O3 is depleted by the time it exits the skimmer.

You can always start with just an ozone generator and then you can get a reactor later if needed. Ozone is very easy to detect by its disinfectant like odor. I’m in the process of adding an ozone reactor now because I can smell a little bit of ozone if I run the ozotech on high during the day for a long time. Orp stays in the low 300s but I don’t want to be worried so that’s the reason for the reactor in my case. Still very happy with it.

 

[Cabinetman]

Do you have the dryer and everything? I can build anything so I could build a reactor easy enough. I just don't want to bother if it's not going to clear my water up.

 

[Cabinetman]

I just ordered the ozotech 220 kit.
https://www.bulkreefsupply.com/ozotech-poseidon-220-kit.html

 

[Paul B]

I have been using Ozone for over 40 years and never ran my tank with out it so I am not sure what, or if it does anything. My tank is only 100 gallons, probably only 90. I run 200mg Ozone at full blast with no carbon. I think in your tank you would need much more Ozone than that 220 unit generates to have any type of effect.
You can not run pure Ozone into your tank through an airstone, it must be used in a skimmer.

 

[saltwaterpicaso]

I have the 220 on my 90 gallon with 40 gallon sump. it is a very powerfull ozone generator I use it with my apex and keep my orp at 400 I have it set to the 2nd position and it will take the orp from 300 to 400 in about an hour so I would definetly run it with the orp controller I didn't when I first got it and orp was threw the roof and I don't use carbon

 

[Cabinetman]

I do plan on injecting it into my skimmer for now but I'm likeky going to make a reactor. I hope I can take advantage of my tank being vented to the outside by having all the excess enter the hood over my tank then get vented outside.

 

[Cabinetman]

Paul I wonder if there's a way I could make a reactor that would go in the corner of my display somehow and it just use an airstone? Or am I just whacked thinking that?

 

[Paul B]

You are whacked thinking that. Use it in a skimmer. The skimmer removes that which is oxidized so that is the best way. You don't want free ozone in your tank or home. If you smell it it will give you an immediate headache. It will also rot your hood if it is made out of almost anything. Forget wood, metal or rubber. You need to use Ozone friendly tubing, not normal vinyl which will rot right off. If you want, you can put pictures of your Mother N Law or X Girlfriends pictures near it.

 

[Cabinetman]

Do you have a thread with pics of how you got yours setup? I'd be interested to see. Not much on the web at all.

 

[Paul B]

Mine may seem a little weird as I build everything myself. I built my first ozonizer from a Neon transformer but it had the habit of dimming the lights in my neighborhood so I bought one. It's on the wall and it feeds into the venturi at the bottom of my "Very cool" DIY skimmer. Don't look at my phone, it is older than most people here but I still use it because I am old school. It's really a cell phone and that cord is just there so I don't lose it.
That big temperature gauge I took off of a boiler in the basement of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. I use it for the temp of my tank.

 

[Cabinetman]

I also build everything myself. Built my own 560 gallon acrylic tank so I can build almost anything out of acrylic. There's a few things I'm trying to take advantage of. First is the fact that I run a fairly large pool sand filter as my main filtration. I have it set up so I can backflush it with fresh water if you're thinking i must waist a pile of water doing the back flush. I'm not sure if I can somehow utilize it to catch the stuff the ozone Zaps or not. The other option is to build a large reaction chamber out of the loads of acrylic I have laying around. I can build pretty much anything. I have a cabinet shop with lots of tools to work with so I'm sorry for coming off as craxy but I'm an inventor and I like thinking outside the box. Don't believe me check out my YouTube channel "woodentoolman". I messed with woodworking inventing stuff for a quite a while but the last few years I've been hooked on this hobby and have been inventing new ways of doing stuff all the time. So now I wanna figure out the best way to utilize ozone. I know I could just inject a skimmer with it but what I'm wondering is if there's a better way or something I can build that would be better.

 

[Cabinetman]

Mine may seem a little weird as I build everything myself. I built my first ozonizer from a Neon transformer but it had the habit of dimming the lights in my neighborhood so I bought one. It's on the wall and it feeds into the venturi at the bottom of my "Very cool" DIY skimmer. Don't look at my phone, it is older than most people here but I still use it because I am old school. It's really a cell phone and that cord is just there so I don't lose it.
That big temperature gauge I took off of a boiler in the basement of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. I use it for the temp of my tank.

what the heck is that Paul!!!! Lol. Does it feed right back into the tank?

 

[Dogtown]

I just ordered the ozotech 220 kit.
https://www.bulkreefsupply.com/ozotech-poseidon-220-kit.html

Do you have the dryer and everything? I can build anything so I could build a reactor easy enough. I just don't want to bother if it's not going to clear my water up.

Congrats! You will soon be enjoying the best water clarity there is. In answer to your question, Yes, I have a dryer. But I don't have a reactor as of just yet - getting one though.

First of all, I'm no ozone expert and was thinking just like you when I started using an ozotech 200 just a couple of months ago. "Do I really need a reactor?"... Like you, I'm a DIY'er so I figured in my case, I'd just run 3/8" tubing from my skimmer up to my attic. Its an idea I got from Randy Holmes. The ozone would be sent under slight pressure, up through the tube, into the attic and outside through roof vents. At least, this was my theory.

Well, long story short, it works OK but isn't a home run. If I only run ozone for 12 hours at night, everything is fine because I'm not around when the ozone is running. The water is really clear the next morning, nitrate is 0 (in fact I dose nitrate now) and PO4 is currently 0.09ppm. The problem is, if I run ozone during the day, I can definitely smell the ozone in the air and it does bother my lunges after a while. Because of that, I don't run the ozone during the day. I notice that many ozone users talk about how they only run it for 4-12 hours at night and I suspect it is because of the same issue.

I like to experiment. If I don't run the ozone at all for a few days, the water loses that ultra clarity the ozone gives it. When I continue using ozone again in the evening, the tank water clarity is back by the next morning. It really does work! Not just that, I have read up everything I can about ozone and its use in reef tanks and it seems those that run ozone seem to have healthy fish that live for years and years and years. Paul B (hey Paul!) is the champion in fish health and longevity and he uses ozone, as we know. But there are several other reef dudes running it as well and they all swear by it. Long term fish health and water clarity are my primary reasons for running ozone.

I was just on the phone with Geo from geosreef earlier today and was asking him about his ozone reactor. If you are interested in the design to DIY your own, you can check out the details below.

Notice the design includes a dedicated carbon reactor on the left to properly treat 100% of the water returning to the sump. There is also a dedicated "Muffler" as he calls it, which is just another form of a carbon reactor for the ozone/air discharge from the main reactor on the right. The carbon in the muffler insures that 100% of the ozone/air exhausted from the reactor is treated properly to remove the residual ozone.

Geo offered to customize the bottom of the muffler with a John Quest fitting instead of the normal exhaust holes so I can go one step further and exhaust all of the residual ozone/air through that 3/8" tubing I already have up and into the attic. This will insure that 100% of the ozone is eliminated. Is it overkill, definitely. But I'm fine with that. Geo recommended the idea and it sounded like he has done this customization before for the same purpose.

The PVC manifold includes a drain valve for convenience when cleaning the reactors. That's a nifty idea.

One last thought. This reactor is 18" tall and the water level in the sump is 8.5". If the reactor is placed on the floor along side of the sump, the water level inside the reactor will be at 8.5". That still provides a healthy 9.5" of air space inside the reactor but that means almost half of the reactor is full of water. I can get a full 18" of air volume if I raise the reactor off the floor by 8.5". Geo said this is not really necessary as its a really large reactor but that I could do this.

I don't have the time or experience with acrylic as you do to DIY one. Tomorrow I'll most likely place an order for his reactor as it looks like the best solution for my needs.

 

[rkpetersen]

30 years ago, I used ozone at a fairly low level, without any kind of monitoring, on a 100 gallon tank for 4 years. Water stayed very clear and didn't smell, despite fairly heavy bioload. How much of this was due to the ozonizer, no way to say. I did not notice any adverse effects I could attribute to ozone, and didn't smell ozone with the cabinet doors closed.

I have a Reefer 450 I started about 6 months ago. I added an ozonizer shortly after getting an Apex controller with ORP probe. I have the same Ozotech Poseidon 220 that others have mentioned. The set up is pretty simple/ basic, but works well. I maybe consider a reactor someday, but I'm not convinced I need one. One problem for me is that all these ozone reactors are bulky, and you still need to run a skimmer, which makes space a bit tight.

Anyway, here's the basics: Air pump to air dryer cannister (I just prop it up behind the tank, this is about 2/3 exhausted),

then air line to ozonizer, to ozone resistant tubing and check valve,

to port on the silencer of the skimmer, where the dry heavily ozonized air is mixed with ambient air and then enters the reaction chamber.

Although all tubing after the ozonizer is ozone resistant, the skimmer and skimmer are not specifically made for ozone, and so an degradation of these components must be watched for. The water output of the skimmer is directed onto a bag of carbon.

A flow-through carbon filter would be better but this seems to suffice. Even just hitting the rough surface of the bag will degrade residual ozone to a degree. You don't want raw ozone going straight into your tank, it's a powerful oxidizer and could be harmful to fish. Even it's breakdown products which can persist a bit longer, such as hypobromite, make many people nervous about using it.

When I first started using this ozonizer, the output was very strong, even at the number 1 setting, although this decreased somewhat after a week or so. Nonetheless, when working under the sump with the ozone on, I could still smell the sharp odor pretty strongly. I made myself a carbon-filled air filter cap for the skimmer, and most of that odor vanished. The cap consists of an 8" non-metallic sieve and #60 polyester mesh elements, purchased from the Gilson Company, enclosing a sizable quantity of GAC.

I also picked up an electronic ozone level meter, and put it about 6 feet away from the tank, on an end table. I've never seen it read anything but the lowest level there. It definitely works; put it in the sump with the carbon cap off, close the door for 1 minute, take a look and it's warning red lights all the way to the top. But one of ozone gas's many interesting properties is that it becomes more unstable and tends to decompose faster as it passes through tight spaces. Meaning just the act of passing through your closed cabinet doors, if you keep your skimmer in a sump, will remove a lot of it.

I have found that, as I continue to use ozone, less and less of it is needed to maintain the same or even gradually increasing ORP level. Right now the ozonizer is set at 4 and operates about 30 minutes a day. ORP in the sump beyond the skimmer runs 450-470, ORP in the overflow returning from the tank 360-380. Apex is programmed to turn both the air pump and ozonizer on and off based on the sump ORP probe setting and other factors. Water stays crystal clear and virtually odorless despite heavy bioload. Some say that using ozone stops skimmers from skimming; that hasn't been my observation, although I do tend to skim wet.

 

[Dogtown]

Rk, That’s a solid write up. Please share more about that electronic ozone meter you mentioned. Is it expensive?

 

[rkpetersen]

Please share more about that electronic ozone meter you mentioned. Is it expensive?

It's definitely more than it probably should be. And they recommend sending it back for recalibration or expensively recalibrating it yourself every year which I'm pretty sure I'm not going to do. I got it partially to keep my wife happy, but it's a cool toy too.

https://www.coleparmer.com/i/eco-sensors-ez-1x-ozone-monitor-continuous-duty/8631620

 

[Cabinetman]

I appreciate all the effort you guys are putting forth to help. I'm definetly learning a lot. Still don't have a plan on how I'm going to implement it but the pieces of the puzzle are filling in.

 

[Dogtown]

It's definitely more than it probably should be. And they recommend sending it back for recalibration or expensively recalibrating it yourself every year which I'm pretty sure I'm not going to do. I got it partially to keep my wife happy, but it's a cool toy too.

https://www.coleparmer.com/i/eco-sensors-ez-1x-ozone-monitor-continuous-duty/8631620

Funny you mentioned the wife. Mine is exactly the same. If I mention this exists, she’ll insist I get it. Lol! I don’t think I’m going to mention this.
Thanks

 

[Paul B]

what the heck is that Paul!!!! Lol. Does it feed right back into the tank?

Cabinetman I am also an inventor with two aquarium related patents and like you a large shop filled with acrylic, various metals and wood. My tank LED lighting system is water cooled with a radiator and all. We sound very similar.
Ozone has been used for about 60 years for water purification and a skimmer is the best way. But you can experiment with different ways to use it. I am sure many ways have been tried, I tried a bunch myself. I don't dump the water from my skimmer right back into my tank. It goes on to a 4' trough mounted just above my tank to the back so you can't see it. It has a bunch of rock and screening in it with some algae so I am sure there is no residual ozone entering my tank and I don't like carbon so I don't use it.
If you use Ozone in a reactor I would vent it outside your house in PVC, not metal ductwork.
Here is the trough