THE USE OF PROTEIN SKIMMER IN RAS SYSTEM

When you decide to start your aquatic farming journey, you may encounter a lot of terminology that you are unfamiliar with. Even if you have prior experience with freshwater aquariums, much of the equipment needed for a saltwater system is different. A protein skimmer is an excellent example. In this post, we'll look at one of the new skimmers that were recently installed in the holding tank. It's a new upgrade, and we'll go over what a skimmer is, why we install it, and where we install it in holding tank systems.

Why do we require a protein skimmer?

Holding tank area at 4:25

So we use this small holding tank system to receive incoming crabs from bulk purchases. That is, we buy in about 100 kilos or 200 kilos each time, and each time we see an increase in ammonia spike.

Ammonia Results of Holding Tank After Incoming Crabs

According to the data, on the 30th of March and when we had incoming crabs on the 1st of April, the ammonia level spiked to 2 ppm and gradually decreased to 0.5 ppm over the next few days. This is because no rough system is designed to operate at full capacity all of the time, and when there are large influxes of crabs, ammonia levels will temporarily rise. These temporary ammonia spikes could result in sudden death in some of the newer crabs that have just arrived from a long distance supply chain.

What is a protein skimmer?

Skimmers, unlike other types of conventional filtration, do not use mechanical methods to filter out contaminants. Instead, it uses air bubbles to force dirt onto the air bubbles, where it is removed by adhering to the air bubbles and foaming out.

Protein skimmer

All of the scum and sludge that is being filtered out of the water is pushed out by the air bubbles. The diameter of the air bubbles determines the efficiency of the skimmers. If the air bubbles are smaller, more waste is attached to the surface areas of the air molecules and is pushed up over time.

The protein skimmer does not replace any of the other filtration systems that are available. It is actually a stand-alone bonus or complementary system. We actually attached this protein skimmer after the biofiltration systems, and it is powered by a small pump that pumps the water into the skimmer, and the skimmer treats it before reintroducing it back into the tank, along with the K1. The reason for incorporating the skimmer at this point is that we previously discovered that a lot of fine solids will tend to accumulate in the retention tank despite already having a small size sand filtration and biofiltration or any smaller debris that has actually existed in the water that may not be efficiently removed by the sand filtration.

The skimmer after a few days of installation; notice how the debris is accumulating on the top part. You can see the water quality before we started installing the skimmer and a comparison after the skimmer was installed. You can see that we can see the bottom much better now, and there is a high loading capacity for introducing off crabs into the holding tanks.

Protein skimmer just installed

After few hours

Eventually, a protein skimmer is required to keep the water in your tank clean. However, some farmers and aquaculturists remain sceptical of its utility and may prefer not to use it on their farm. It is certainly acceptable not to use skimmer in the farm as long as we can keep the water clean for the aquatic animals, but they would eventually end up with a protein skimmer for the benefits it provides.

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