Question About Skimmers...

[curtisk]

For some reason my skimmers (Octopus RPS 1000 & Nautilus TE) will skim like mad when I put them in a sloution of Vinegar and water but the second I put the in my sump the don't do crap?!?! I know my tank has a ton of crap in it 'cause I have a hair algae factory that I'm trying to kill. Just wondering if anybody else has this problem or had this problem? TIA

[luke33]

How old is your tank, and skimmers? Do you dose your tank with anything? Your getting nothing?

[mushumatt]

The hair algae can be attributed to the phosphate levels in your tank or light which wont be controllable by the skimmer. Have you tryied to adjust it?

[curtisk]

The tank is a little over a year old. The Nautilus is about 3 years old and the Octopus is about 4 months old. I only dose Seachem Reef Buffer and Reef Advantage Calcium. I feed maybe twice a week. I have 3 fish and 4 corals. I had the Octopus up and running since the first of this year and only got a 1/4 cup skimmate once a week. So I decided to go back to my Nautilus. It's been running now for about a week and managed to get about the same amount (1/4 cup) of skimmate as the Octopus. What could be in my water that's making my skimmers perform so crappy? Here's some of the water parameters:

Alk. ~ 3.0 Meq/L
Cal.-360 ppm
pH-7.9~8.1
Temp.-79.5
PO4-0
NO3-0

[luke33]

Maybe you just don't have that much organic waste in there. Sounds like a lightly stocked tank, and you don't feed heavily so that could be it. If you weren't getting any skimmate i'd be worried. Are you skimming dry, maybe raise your water level a touch and get some wetter skimmate.

[USC-fan]

you really should be getting more skimmate than that. Maybe a pic of your setup could help trouble shoot the problem. Seems to me that you are skimming too dry but it hard to say without the pics.