Can water be too clean?

[LeslieS]

I just added a 50 micron filter sock to the tank. The water looks spectacular, but will it harm the filter feeders?

 

[scarf_ace1981]

i doubt a 50 micron sock will remove all beneficial bacteria but kudos for the sparkling water.:biggrin:

 

[Josh]

If you have a sump with some caulerpa then the sock doesn't make much of a different IMO. I can tell you that this topic is one of extreme debate in the hobby. One extreme would be ultra-skimming with barebottom, the other side is "ghetto reefing" with a deep sand bed.

Personally, I think deep sand beds are important, they provide a nice place to store nutrients and microfauna. I can assure you that my tank was more successful when it wasn't sparkling (LPS, softies, some SPS). The flip side of this is that gradually deep sand beds become permanently filled with some sort of nitrate/nitrite, heavy metals, something. After 5 years the tank could not recover no matter how many water changes I did. This ended when algae overtook the tank, microfauna died, and pest anemones became prominent.

From what I have seen, bare bottoms don't work unless you are sitting there watching the tank during the day. You need some sort of buffer and you need the diversity that a sand bed offers. My recommendation (and take this with a bucket of salt since I haven't had a tank in nearly 2 years) is to have a fairly shallow sand bed that can be removed and replaced every year with fresh aragonite.

If you don't have a lot of SPS you can experiment with how dirty the tank can be before things start dying. Use some xenia, montis, and acros as a test case. When the acros AND xenia die (but the montis live) you are past the limit for nitrite/nitrate/organics in the water column. At that point your LPS and Zoas should be doing well, but unless you want to only keep those types of corals you will need to start doing more water changes, running more carbon, increase your skimming, or putting in socks.

On socks in particular, they are dangerous in that they skim out the organics but if not changed regularly the waste compounds leech right back into the water. So as clear as the water may get, the bad stuff is still getting in unless you change or clean then all the time. A high powered skimmer should be able to make your water crystal clear if you crank it up.

My opinion.

 

[Josh]

i doubt a 50 micron sock will remove all beneficial bacteria but kudos for the sparkling water.:biggrin:

One note. I think a 50mic sock will only remove microfauna/flora, NOT bacteria. But, you will have a lot of organics sitting in highly oxygenated water within the the sock, so you may see a chemistry spike due to you giving space to the aerobics and the oxygen will allow the wastes to break down without a water based companion in some cases.

I think solbby can clarify this.