Surface skimmer

[ckll]

Has anybody encountered filter airlock when surface skimmer is used ?

My filter airlocked this morning. Skimmer was installed on Monday. Noticed that after installing skimmer, the amount of air/undissolved CO2 trapped in reactor was more than before.

Or is there anything I should be paying attention to which I did not ?

Thanks.

[wf7850]

Bro

It may be you have adjusted the water to flow too much from the top of the surface skimmer hence air being sucked into the filter..... try adjusting the knob clockwise/anticlockwise to achieve a balance....

[Desewer]

Try using the Atman skimmer from NA, instead of the normal black ones from LFS. The Atman one has a floating/buoyant weight at the bottom basket. If not enough water is taken in from the top, the bottom will float and water is taken in from the basket. This allows for flexibility when using the skimmer.

The drawback is that the skimmer inlet at the top is large enough for fish like otocinclus to get stuck inside. I clean my filter once a month and I usually find assorted fish n stuff, like shrimps, baby cardinals (when I first bought them, very small), etc etc... All still alive and breathing, because of the food sucked into the filter!

[BFG]

Well, the only thing you could do is to manually overturn the external reactor to let the gas escape back to the tank.

[Nicky]

I also ever encountered the same before. 2 possible causes to this:

The Surface Skimmer is placed too near to the surface.
- I used to use a short 2 inches flexible pipe to connect the skimmer to the green eheim hard tubings. This resulted in small tolerance of fluatuation of water level. Once the water is evaporated beyond a small interval, the transparent portion of the skimmer will drop too much into the black portion and caused air to be sucked in. What I do now is to install a 4-5 inches of flexible tubing instead.

The inside portion of the Transparent portion of the skimmer is coated with 'slime'
- What that happens somehow the water that flows into the skimmer from the top will cause alot of bubbles and some of the them will be sucked into the filter. Just wash the inside of that transparent portion with toothbrush to rid the slime.

[ckll]

Thanks everyone for the views and experience!

Will make sure I have enough clearance between filter-skimmer connection and water level, and keeping enough balance such that not too much water is sucked in from surface.

This is a new skimmer. Will watch out for slime coating on the transparent plastic tube during wc ..


Thanks again!