Bored! So lets design a Skimmer!

[mojoreef]

Ok so I have been getting alot of questions of skimmers and skimmer design types and so on and to be honest I cant really see any out their that I can turn folks to as the concepts and the price points are just out their. Sooooo lets play around and see what we as a group can come up with, then we can beat up of Frank or some other handy fellow to actually make the thing.

Ok so we have to have some kind of guidelines to follow so here they are.

> It has to be easy enoght for a simple DIY guy to build.

> It has to follow these principles: http://www.reeffrontiers.com/forums/f14/skimming-numbers-59522/

> We have to keep the overall price of the unit cheap!!


Anyway take a moment to read the link and then start throwing out some ideas!! All those handy fellows like Frank, Don, Peppie, skimmy and so on you will be hounded unil you participate!!! and that goes for anyone else someone tells me is alike!!


Mojo

 

[DonW]

How big of a tank? Do we care about electricity or do want to conserve? What is cheap?

 

[mojoreef]

Well you cant really rate a skimmer to tank size, to many variables right?? A person could have a 25 gallon and produce more bioload/nutrients then someone that has a 200 gallon. So for scale lets go with a medium size tank or bioload so a 100 gallon to 200 gallon tank with a decent bioload. I guess we should make it scalable to.

we should keep electricity in play, but I dont think it should completely dictate. On the cheap thing, lets just say alot cheapper then most of these crasy priced units on the market.


Mojo

 

[DonW]

Well you cant really rate a skimmer to tank size, to many variables right?? A person could have a 25 gallon and produce more bioload/nutrients then someone that has a 200 gallon. So for scale lets go with a medium size tank or bioload so a 100 gallon to 200 gallon tank with a decent bioload. I guess we should make it scalable to.

we should keep electricity in play, but I dont think it should completely dictate. On the cheap thing, lets just say alot cheapper then most of these crasy priced units on the market.


Mojo

OMG what are you a lawyer? Cant get a straight answer out of them either. How about a cone needle wheel? This should keep frankie busy for awhile and can be built from sheet goods.

Don

 

[mojoreef]

LOL hey!!! It can be a needle wheel, downdraft, beckette, air stone or what ever as long as we can satisfy the rules and laws that govern it. Sheet goods will be fine but everything is on the table.

Mike

 

[Krish]

How about a needle wheel air stone driven becket skimmer with downdraft? That should be simple enough! :banplease:

No seriously, what about doing a rectangular skimmer of some sort of like the AquaC Urchin or CPR Backpack or Hydor (all are clickable links)? This will probably be the easist skimmer for anyone to build who has a table saw or skill saw. Anyone who can build a box can bascially build it. When you get into to skimmers in the shape of a cylinder, the body is easy for anyone as they just buy the acrylic cylinder and cut to length, but then when it comes to the lid etc, not very many people are good and working with routers to make perfect circles. In addition, rectangular skimmers are easier to be mounted as a hang-on if need be.

Just another option I thought I'd throw out.

 

[mojoreef]

Careful Krish or I will reset your post count to zero!! lol No hang on skimmers are a completely different animal and kind of boring, lets go bigger.

 

[Krish]

Careful Krish or I will reset your post count to zero!! lol No hang on skimmers are a completely different animal and kind of boring, lets go bigger.

LOL! We don't need to do a hang on, but if you did say a big rectangular style, someone who wanted a hang on could do a smaller scaled version of your with a few little mods to convert it to a hang on, but the main thing would be to make a skimmer anyone can build.

Just throwing out options.

 

[DonW]

Ok looks like Krish messed with this post. We can do a recirc to keep the feed rate at what ever we want. I like the cone in compresses the small bubble group real nice at the top. I have the cone excel calculator if someone wants to run some number since I'm not smart enough.

Don

 

[Myteemouse]

You can use my SWC 250 2x sicce pumps. 10 inch body NONE cone style to mod the hell out of if you like!

 

[mojoreef]

WOW Don did you see that??? Krish deleted my thread?? It was a long one to?? Krish you have no idea on how bad I am going to screw with you over that one, lol.

Ok so let me re write that one again!!

Ok so the first principle we need to take care of and the one most skimmers fail at is the contact dwell time. So what we need to do is to make sure we have the air and water mixing in an area of the skimmer. So what we need to do is to allow for enough time for the air bubble to beat up on the water molecules and cleave off the protiens that are attached to the water mole. On top of that we need time for the now released protien to chemically attach to the air bubble surface, aslo for the protiens and similar to gather at a point so they can have the right place to hang out prior to being removed. SO on that one picture a protien, one with a tail, now they like to dip the tail but also like to keep the balance out of the water, so that is going to come into play with the consistance of the foam, but we can address that a little latter.

So in knowing that we can get air to the skimmer via a needle wheel, beckett or some form of venturi ( I will skip the air stone because its just to darn easy, lol) but the fact that the ammount of flow required to get the air is going to make us loose the kind of contact time we need.

So how do we get passed this??


Mojo

 

[Krish]

My bad... Thought I was editing my post from the iphone using tapatalk and I edited the wrong one . This isn't the first time I've done something like this from tapatalk. I've closed threads a few times by accident as well. Guess I need to pay more attention when posting rather than trying to multi task posting on RF and feeding the baby while I have my little girl screaming in my ears.

 

[mojoreef]

Mytee thanks for the offer, but for this thread I want to make it something anyone can really build, and building the shape of that skimmer is alot tougher then most of us could do. But I would say follow along and we can mod it if you want at the same time.

Ok DOn so we are a little mixed up here in order (since my thread was deleted!!) So lets look at recirculating. If we did that we would take the ammount of water the pump needs to have in order to make air out of the equation!, thats a good thing that way we could go with a feed pump or bleed a line off the pump to do that. So lets look at compacity?? SO lets say the skimer chanber is going to hold 2 gallons of water?? and we want like a minute of dwell time?? maybe more? water would the water in and out have to be??


Mojo

 

[TheKraken]

I would like to play. I present a lump of plastic that was sold to Mike (herefishyfishy) with a GX4100 pump. I was more interested in the pump. Well, it turns out that the pump impeller has split with exposure to salt and rusted in place. It came out in a lot of parts. The head was the traditional impeller type with no mods...

I can:
* Get the $80 needle wheel from reef dynamics (EPSP4 Complete Pin-Wheel Impeller Assembly).
* I can get a $20 impeller and mesh mod.
* I have pumps on the shelf from panworld (1100GPH), Iwaki (500 GPH) Amp master (2300 gph) a red sea skimmer pump, mag 5 &7, and power heads.

I can run this as a beckett, recirc, or needlewheel. I can mount in sump with a submersed pump or make external. I can drill a hole in the side for a recirc or even place the pump inside the box assembly and run the cord out a bulkhead. I can fab a bubble plate or spray paint it pink.

So Mike, if you you were given the plastic box above, what would you do?

~ 30" tall in the picture. 4"/6" tubes if I remember. Other pictures on request.


(Mods, my image foo is weak. I do not have flicker so your help displaying the image in the text is appreciated.)...

Disregard. Make post with attachment, get URL, edit post with URl and circle all the way back.

 

[BryNik]

Hey, I'm new here, but not to the hobby. I'm a tinkerer with all things and prefer to do everything myself, even if a cheaper, proven solution is available. I've been toying with the idea of a homebuilt skimmer constructed with a large pump motor driving a big (like 5") needle impeller. Sort of a self powered pinwheel arrangement. It'd draw air in through any type of inlet (throttle) valve you chose to use if you gave it a vent to atmosphere. I'd post a sketch, but need to figure out how yet. Outwardly, It'd look like any pinwheel skimmer constructed from round tubing...but with a motor in it driving the pinwheel. Make sense to anyone?

 

[Krish]

Hey, I'm new here, but not to the hobby. I'm a tinkerer with all things and prefer to do everything myself, even if a cheaper, proven solution is available. I've been toying with the idea of a homebuilt skimmer constructed with a large pump motor driving a big (like 5") needle impeller. Sort of a self powered pinwheel arrangement. It'd draw air in through any type of inlet (throttle) valve you chose to use if you gave it a vent to atmosphere. I'd post a sketch, but need to figure out how yet. Outwardly, It'd look like any pinwheel skimmer constructed from round tubing...but with a motor in it driving the pinwheel. Make sense to anyone?

Welcome to RF! :welcome:. You may need to meet a minimum post criteria to post a picture as we had to put that feature in place to help with protecting the forum from spammers, but give this a shot. http://www.reeffrontiers.com/forums/f236/how-post-photos-images-not-attachments-59241/. If it doesn't work, I think you will only need about 5 or so posts.

 

[dhnguyen]

I'd say DIY a cone skimmer. And for the cheap use PVC traffic cones for the bodies. Who cares if you can't see through it, it would still work all the same right?

Traffic Cones | Traffic Safety Store

 

[Skimmy]

lulz... a orange or green saftey cone!!

but seriously...
my vote goes for a cone body with a good bubble plate, and a pinwheel pump, either modded from sratch with a smaller hagen aquaclear 70/110 pump(made by askoll/laguna) or with a new sicce psk 1000 that comes with pinwheel and venturi.

another thing that would be cool is a cone skimmer with bubble plate powered by a pvc manifold of several airstones...

and if frankie builds it, i want a smokey grey colored cone body and green pvc (clear or opaque) accents...
oh and some uv /royal blue/rgb leds built into the body for flourescence!!

 

[Guerry]

I love DIY, here's a pic of diy skimmer I built for my system

I'm in the prosess of build a monster becket right now and will do a build thread for you guys

 

[dhnguyen]

A cone skimmer with airstones sounds promising. Though with airstones I don't think the bubble plate would be needed.
And I wasn't kidding about using PVC traffic cones for the body. It's doable on the cheap.