skimmate with no biolad

[toytech]

So recently ive set up a 120 gal with a 30 gal sump and its the first time ive got to fire up my SC 150 skimmer I bought new 3 years ago . The tank was set up with around 75-80 lbs of rock I cleaned , bleached , and dried from my old tank and around 15 lbs of live rock and has been running for over a month now . Ive gone though a cycle and now its the usual algae on and offs and is just ticking away with no fish and only a few hermits and the whole time the skimmer has been pulling thick skimmate . I clean the cup every three days , inch and a half of dark , stinky skimmate, and there is a quarter inch of buildup in the neck .I cleaned it yesterday and today there was an inch of quite dark skimmate and a lot of buildup again. I figured it would have slowed down by now but dosent seem to be , is this normal ? seems a little excessive to me.

[Aquattro]

When I ran my tank with no fish for 3 months, my skimmer almost completely shut down, that's with a tank full of coral. So I'd say no, not normal.

[apexifd]

Hard to say though. The old dried rock may have a lot of dead matters in there.

[Wretch]

I don't have anything in my tank but a small cleanup crew and coral. My skimmer barely seems to be working. Get to add my first fish this week so will see what happens then.

[toytech]

Update , cleaned the skimmer last night , nasty is the only way to put it. It was 4 days worth , skimmer still skimming like a champ . I have noticed a drop in detritus in the display and I cleaned the sides of the tank I let get covered with gha 2 weeks ago and nothing has grown back , no film algae on the glass in weeks so I think im getting the upper hand on this mess. The funny part is ive never had algae on the rock work just gha on the glass that I let grow for pods to multiply in so I cant figure where this crap is coming from.

[asylumdown]

If it was rock that had been in a tank for any amount of time, I'm not surprised. Cleaning and bleaching the rock will remove most of the life on it, but bleach is notorious for making things look cleaner than they actually are (i.e., the organics are still there, they're just the same colour as the rock). Plus all the tens of millions of micropores that would be filled with biofilms in mature rock that the cleaning would have never reached. It would have been cool had you weighed this rock the day after you first got it wet again, I bet there'd be a measurable decrease by now.

FWIW, I think you're doing it exactly right. You're doing what people do when they cook rock, only you're doing it with a skimmer on the system in conditions very similar to those the rock will be run in permanently. Only thing I'd do differently would be to turn off the lights, but if the algae isn't growing out of control, harvesting it might actually help the process along faster. Waiting until it depletes enough to stop emitting crap in to the water before you add anything else is going to save you months worth of trouble down the line IMO, so kudos to you for having the patience.

Are you ghost feeding? If you are I'd stop. If your skimmer is pulling that much crap out of the water, there's probably more than enough of a microbial food chain munching away at the rock's trapped organics to keep your pods and hermits fed.