Fed Up With My Skimmer

**sheamurai** · 11-27-2011, 04:54 PM

I've taken the darn thing apart now three times and it still is not working right.
It hasn't really worked since the day I got it - first sucking air, wrong part delivered, then becoming noisy and ineffectual. Its supposed to be a good skimmer - a deltec - but I must have done something to it when I first got it and was ignorant of how it worked, because after the one mistake I made with it, I never was happy with it for long, even tho it did work properly for a couple months at a time, for about a year.

This last cleaning I can't get it to work without WAY too much noise.

So I've relegated it to the fish box. No skimmer on my reef tank now. I have no intention of replacing it, unless and until my corals decline.

We'll see how it goes.
No visible effects on my corals yet...

**ILuvMyGoldBarb** · 11-27-2011, 05:02 PM

What kind of corals are you keeping, and what fish do you have in there? No skimmer is fine, as long as you replace it with more frequent water changes.

Are you sure there was no air trapped around the magnet on the needle wheel? That will cause a lot of noise. Also, look at the magnet and see if there is any scoring on it. That would indicate dirt in the chamber.

**sheamurai** · 11-27-2011, 06:08 PM

Well, its hard to tell if there's air in there, the top twists on and is not visible at all once I put it back in the skimmer. Could very well be, as I fill the tube and not the body of the skimmer. If my corals start to show decline, I will give it another go and put it back in, taking care to fill the housing with water rather than just the tube and letting it flow in there.

Corals, not too much really. The aforementioned shrooms, a large bubble coral, an acan, a few sad zoas, 2 varieties of rhodactis, some trumpets and star polyps, and a monster frogspawn (well, its the biggest I've ever seen, anyway).

The bubble is what I will be most closely watching, as it seems to be the most sensitive of whats in there.