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TNREEF
01/26/2002, 04:49 PM
Randy,
What does an ozonizer do for the water chemistry? If any? I am not new to the hobby but I am new to the gizmos.
Thank you for your time.

*I have just read you post on Ozone and am really confused now:)

Randy Holmes-Farley
01/26/2002, 07:52 PM
TN:

Sorry for the confusion. That post was intended for a person with a strong background in ozone.

Ozone is intended to reduce organics in reef tanks. Many claim that it helps skimmers work better, but I'm not convinced of that. IMO, what it does is alter a bunch of organics that build up in tanks that are relatively unpalatable for the bacteria and other microbes that are present, and make them more palatable. These bugs then eat them and otherwise convert them into things that are skimmable.

Ozone is especially effective at clearing water of yellowing compounds. That's because ozone readily oxidizes carbon carbon double bonds, and other types of unsaturation, which are what often lead to compounds being colored.

I've never used ozone in my reef tank, and don't typically recommend it. It has become substantially less popular in the past 5 years.

garbled
01/26/2002, 11:51 PM
How much ozone would it take to achieve a 100% kill ratio in a skimmer?

I'm not trying to create one of those sterile tanks, but I was thinking along the lines of an article I read where the author used a UV to create sterile water to do rotifer/phyto growth in-line.

Randy Holmes-Farley
01/27/2002, 08:19 AM
garbled:

<< How much ozone would it take to achieve a 100% kill ratio in a skimmer? >>

Are you talking about sterilizing freshwater used in a culture (relatively easy) or continual sterilization of salt water in a closed system?

FWIW, to sterilize the tank water you run a big risk of damaging other things in the tank. Ozone isn't like UV in one very important sense: UV is confined to the device, whereas ozone and it's byproducts will be getting into the tank, and potentially sterilizing the whole tank. I wouldn't use ozone to sterilize tank water in line with living organisms.

Still, if you want to try it....

Do you know what you want to kill? It shouldn't be hard to find the amount of ozone used to sterilize freshwater, and you can extrapolate that to your situation if you want, but some things are much harder to kill than others. I don't know if you'd be able to find any sterilization info on seawater (which will be very, very different than freshwater because the ozone will quickly react with iodide and bromide to make other things that aren't present in freshwater)

TNREEF
01/27/2002, 08:55 AM
Thank you Randy. I think I will leave this gizmo off my tank.

garbled
02/02/2002, 04:44 PM
I don't have the article here with me, otherwise I'd point you at it.. but the basic premise of it is simple:

Take water inline from a tank, and very slowly put it though a UV sterilizer to achieve a 100% kill, then feed it into a phytoplankton culture, which flows into a rotifer culture, which flows back into the tank.

The problem with this, is that the heat from the UV is more than enough to cause calcium to scale on the interior of the UV unit, blocking the light, so the author uses some complex system of H2O2 and CO2 to lower PH.

Anyhow, my idea was to run a skimmer, or skimmer-like device, with massive amounts of ozone, and then send it through something that would outgas all the ozone in the water, and then into the phyto culture. The idea being that a very low flow would be maintained here, perhaps 1-5 GPH.

Basically, I would want to kill just about anything that got into it, bacteria, unicellular organisims, rotifers, etc to prevent contamination of the phytoplankton.

Perhaps it's too complex in practice, I was just toying with the idea to avoid having to use a CO2 bottle. I'd be concerned however of what the reactions might do to the water and dissolved elements at that concentration. I suppose I don't want any bizzare precipitates.

Randy Holmes-Farley
02/02/2002, 05:38 PM
garbled:

I suppose I don't want any bizzare precipitates.

Or bizzare, highly oxidizing, soluble species that are not ozone, but things like hypochlorite (bleach) made from ozone and chloride in tank water. I wouldn't want to send a stream of these onto anything that I wanted to live.