Ozone and Skimmer

[Chitownpw]

I thinking of running ozone, but don't want to pay the additional cost of having a separate ozone reactor - i.e., I want to run it through my skimmer.

I have a Reef Octopus (pinwheel) that is supposed to be made of ozone tolerant plastic.

How do people generally run the ozone through the skimmer? Where do you place the carbon to filter out the excess ozone - on top of the skimmer and also over the water output pipe?

Thoughts/advice would be appreciated.

[Arthur1]

Chit, I run ozone through a reactor but I may make my own reactor next time around either out of pvc or glass, depending on my mood lol. If you notice, on the lid of your skimmer, there are holes to basically vent out the air from the skimmer itself. What I would do personally is cover or silicone those holes, drill a hole in the lid for a bulkhead fitting and attach a barbed fitting to that, attach a piece of silicone resistant tubing to the barbed fitting, having it then attached to some sort of container that holds carbon. Sorry, I tried to sum it up as quickly as possible for you lol. On the ouput of the skimmer, many people will basically hang a media bag with carbon from it, changing it out every so often. I know a lot of people that don't use any carbon on the output as well but the carbon does make you feel comfortable. Hope that helps you at least a little!

[Chitownpw]

thanks. have you personally noticed a lot of benefits from the use of ozone?

[gary504504]

Following along as I have a ozone unit on my shelf and recently I've been thinking about hooking it up, lately

[Arthur1]

Well if you want to extrapolate, you can say a lot lol. Water clarity was the biggest issue. Running carbon as we all know helps with water clarity but once it becomes exhausted, that's it. Your can take it a step further as the clearer the water, the further light can penetrate into it, in effect illuminating and providing your corals with more light withing your same lighting schedule. Looking from one end of an 8' aquarium once could easily notice a color to the water, even with carbon and a 12'' diameter skimmer. Since running ozone, the water looks like how many of us think of water, "clear". When I volunteered at the New England Aquarium a while back I remember feeding the salmon display and the water always had a yellowish tinge, until ozone was added, then it became crystal clear in no time! Moral of the story, water clarity

[mariusmeyer]

This is what I did with my skimmer and running ozone. I used a normal cookie container, fortunately it came in reef octopus red as well.

Added tubing in all of the holes and it leads into the cookie container filled with carbon. I normally have the lid off of the top container but it looked cool with the matching color.

[wildman926]

If you run a unit that can produce 50mg/h or less, you don't have the problems associated with running more ozone, have to run carbon, and still reap the benefits. Here is what and how I use an ozone generator. The output of the ozone generator is plumbed into the volute of my skimmer using 1/4" acrylic and vinyl tubing. I have done this with my old SRO skimmers, as well as my Aquamaxx skimmers. I run them on a timer from one hour on, one hour off, during the night from 11 pm to 6 am. Here are pics of them -

Ozone Generator


Previous Skimmer


Aquamaxx Skimmer

[cvicente]

Very clever !