Tom,
The skimmer is actually the smaller sized Deltec AP600. When the main tank (120g) was solitary, the skimmer was fine. Now that I added an additional 100 gallons of water to the system, the AP600 is probably undersized even though it's rated for 130g heavy stocking and 220g normal stocking.
The connected tank is only about 6 weeks old but my PO4 & NO3 is still very low, pretty much no changes even though some additional live rock and fish were added to the overall system.
Actually all the corals and clams with the exception of the two LPS Brains up front, came from the main tank. You can probably guess that my main tank was getting crowded. All that was added was 32 lbs of Fiji, 16 lbs of Tonga branch, 6 Hawaiian Bi-Color Anthias, a small Copperband, the two LPS Brains and maybe a frag or two of SPS. So the majority of the bio-load was already in the main system before this overflow/connected tank was setup.
Lights are a TEK T5 six bulb unit. They are suspended about 7 to 8 inches off the water surface.
Spykes
saw the setup and felt the colors were washed out like in a washing machine. I do agree with him to a degree, they are not as deep and rich in color as with the MH lighting but they not browning out either.
While the water parameters are shared with the main tank, flow and lighting are different.
Main tank runs 720 watts in lighting and 165 watts for the closed loop, connected tank runs 236 watts in lighting and 30 watts for a pair of Tunze 6000s. I figure this extra setup runs a minimal amount of electrical use per month, maybe $25 to $30 only. Not bad for another entire tank, huh?
So is your skimmer handling the volume of water in your system Deltec APF600? How is the experiment with T5 going? Did you try to frag a piece from the main tank and place it in the T5 setup? How high is the T5 from the water surface?
