Can salt water be recycled?

[EVO]

Hello! I'm new here and I was wondering if anyone had any luck with recycling salt water so you don't have to keep buying salt? The LFS guy told me I needed a serious skimmer to take the stuff out of the water then I don't need bio balls jusy drip screen for particle filtration. Sooo... what if I took say a 20 gal long aquarium and add a few glass inserts to make say 4 compartments the first three will each have a good skimmer. First stage skim water... water goes into second stage for more skimming... and so on... will it get to a point where it's good as new water? Then I can just run a canister with a micron filter to take out the particles and never change the water? Does this sound insane? Water gets recycled in nature... be it a larger system but can it be done in the aquarium?

Don't hit me!

 

[Anonymous]

>... Don't hit me!
I am tempted... just kidding

First of all, welcome to RDO!

As to your question, saltwater is recycled to some extend in all of our tanks. That's why we only do 10% water change instead of 100% every single week. 90% of the water is "recycled" if you only change 10% of the water in the tank.

If you have good filtration on the tank, and with very little overfeeding, it is possible to go a long time without water change. The better you manage what goes into the water, the better handle you will have on it. This is why some of us use RO/DI for topoff, with very little feeding, and use efficient skimmer and filtration.

Particles is not a major problem unless they breaks down into nutrient. You may want to do a search on this board and elsewhere to get more familiar with terminology and some tried-and-true techniques.

 

[Anonymous]

I think you could buy a whole lot of salt for what you would pay for a few extra skimmers.
Andy

 

[SnowManSnow]

Doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to try to me.

IMO

B.

 

[Jolieve]

I am of the opinion that you don't need the bio-balls now. Unless you give these things a good rinse every week or so, they tend to become nitrate factories... which in the freshwater tanks they were originally designed around, isn't such a bad thing. However, in marine tanks so many things are sensitive to high nitrate content that you're better off without them.

As far as the rest... google.

Do some research on your own to decide what is going to work best for you and your system. I do recommend a good protein skimmer (aqua C, euro-reef and etc) and some kind of water filtration for your source water (RO/DI unit).

J.

 

[spsmike]

The problem that may arise is replenishing the trace elements as they are utilized.You would need to dose for everything.These are replenished naturaly in the wild by decomposing earth and natural events.