Did you have a protein skimmer to start with?

It may sound bad, but I’ve ironically always just purchased them used or tend to use a surface skimmer to get rid of the excess surface foam from any protein that was in the tank. I’ve found them highly useful, but I guess that I haven’t really had a tank that didn’t fully require it (and had the bad assumption that it just was a common piece of equipment that was needed).

I’ve seen these for freshwater tanks too, is it really needed to have or is it just for saltwater because you have to make waves which make the foam?

NoFishBefore said:

I’ve seen these for freshwater tanks too, is it really needed to have or is it just for saltwater because you have to make waves which make the foam?

It’s really used to get rid of protein since it does foam up, and way more on saltwater than freshwater (freshwater only really gets a protein build up if the water is too still or if there are foods being fed that are leaching a lot of protein into the water).

I started with a cheap one that was for both freshwater and saltwater tanks, before moving to a real protein skimmer that collected the protein vs. pushing it through a filter to break it apart before spitting it back out.