To sock or not to sock??

very nice, less baffling for me.....

 

But wouldn't that shot the water up into the air?

I'm new to the hobbie as well, so I'm lovin this topic. Simply because I just happen to be using a sock/no sock setup (I just made that up). This might be the greatest thing ever or not . Like I said I'm new to the hobbie. My thoughts was this. I didn't want my nice new skimmer to get all clogged up with big dibree but at the same time I don't want to remove stuff that goes great in the refugi area. So I have a sock in the skimmer area and NO sock in the refugi area. This let me keep my skimmer cleaner and let's pods and what not go into the refugi. Given though the sock will still filter out some good stuff but I'm hoping not all of it.

Good idea or not so good or whatever
your thoughts.

Btw that anti bubble thing. Would that would on my skimmer? It seems to be producing alot of micro bubbles. I was told that they should go away after it's broke in. But thought I would ask just in case.

 

without reading the entire thread, i will say that I do not sock. Most of the bad stuff will get grabbed up by your skimmer if you have a decent one. I have a very large sump and i let the nastiness settle in there. that way, water is not running through a bunch of detritus but over it rather. When I do my water changes, i just syphon out the sump and there you have it. I really don't know any serious sps keepers in my area that run socks for this reason

 

JMO: I've use a 5 micron sock (i have 3 with 1 in operation at a time) in my sump/with fuge and place small LR pcs in the sock. I only have the sock in my sump for 4 days out of the week(mon-thurs) b/c the sock does catch some beneficials. if you allow the sock to sit too long you will have nitrate issues i believe, but constantly having a clean sock in the sump may deprive water column of beneficials. if your going away for awhile and cant maintain tank i would just opt out of using sock. I haven't gotten the white haze you have spoken of without the sock.
bottom line for me is bio filter is the best way to go but socks lighten the load as i dust of my rocks on a regular bases and the sock is the key player in taking these fines out of water column. on day w/out sock i still dust off LR but allow for corals to catch what they can and just let the fines float around.

 

I use socks. I dont have anything else in the sump but a skimmer. Coil denitrator drips into the sump. Thats it. No fuge...pretty much as simple as you can get. Going 4 years in that tank now, so far so good 0 nitrates. Except for the weekly sock change I havent cleaned anything but scraping the glass for a couple years now.

 

algae bloom after removing sock

Interesting - 5 days after removing sock and now I'm having a green algae bloom. CUC can't keep up with it. Did my water change on schedule and measurements the day after - Nitrates 0.

 

When you turn up and increase the size of the pipe it increases the area and in turn slows the water down so you won't have it shooting in the air. If you kept the pipe the same size it would though.

 

got a pic of it otty?

 

Ob1 say yes Grasshopper LOL hey some listen some don't If I could only get to them before they start to read LOL I have never in my life used a baffle never found a need to create work and problems for myself .

 

Correlation doesn't indicate causality. It could just be your nutrient levels catching up to something else. It's possible that removing the filter sock did uncover some other deeper problems though, maybe like overfeeding, an issue with a skimmer underperforming or something.
Having 0 nitrates on a test kit doesn't mean the they aren't there it may just mean that the algae and other consumers of nitrate are removing it before you can test for it.