Bored! So lets design a Skimmer!

[Sasquatch]

I am not sure why you are using PB. Just go to the members gallery and upload your pictures their?? then do a copy of the pictures properties, come to the thread and hit the little picture button, copy in the properties/location of the picture and it will work.

Mojo

thats as much work as PB lol, whats wrong with the attachments?

 

[mojoreef]

Attachments should be fine?? whats the issue??


Mojo

 

[Sasquatch]

can you see the ones I posted without clicking them? they should be viewable in the post

 

[mojoreef]

Is that not the way they are supposed to be>?? as in you click on them and they bring up a new window??


Mojo

 

[Sasquatch]

uh no, they should be pictures not silly looking computer muck, you need to change a setting to "display attachments"

 

[mojoreef]

Hmm thats not just as easy as that. It takes a bunch of work and then the attachments have to all be rebuilt. and since we have over 36 thousand of them I am going to pass on that one my friend. sorry

Mike

 

[Sasquatch]

Hmm thats not just as easy as that. It takes a bunch of work and then the attachments have to all be rebuilt. and since we have over 36 thousand of them I am going to pass on that one my friend. sorry

Mike

what, you got something better to do? lol lazy bugger

 

[spark82]

just became a member this is an interesting post

 

[spark82]

That is some nice work how did you do the angles for the top plates

 

[TheKraken]

Just ordered a boss hogg and looking at which air pump toget. The commercial air 1 @ 38lpm for about $38 or the commercial air 3 @ 65 lpm at $52 - might as well get the 65lpm one and can always valve it down. It'll be noisy but sitting out in the garage and run a hose into the tank will work

Turns out that the the local hydroponics shop (Indoor Gardens in Lynnwood) stocks the Boss Hogg and others in the same line... The also have the commercial air pumps right on the same shelf.

So where did we get on this thread? I have a "Becket style" body in the garage and would like to start buying parts. I am plumbing a "herbie" style drain into the skimmer under siphon and a normal ball valve/adjustable height drain tube.

 

[Peppie]

I have a skimmer on the drawing board. I was advised to do my math.
It seems that the dwell time and bombardment rate are critical to the performance to these gadgets.
So, Mike will you please check my numbers and let me know if I can start to build this skimmer.

360 gal total water volume in system. 250gph pump on skimmer. every 13.24hrs all water will have passed thru skimmer

Skimmer will hold 15gal of water 250gph run thru skimmer

250gph/60 = 4.16gal per min It will take 3.6min to run 15 gal of water thru the skimmer

210sec/aprox 8sec(bubbles to travel up) 210/8 =26.25

That last number seems high?? what do you think???
Sounds like I should increase my flow

 

[mojoreef]

Dave with the number what we are looking for ballpark, we dont have to crunch them to much unless we have an issue. So the biggest one is contact time, as it takes time for air bubbles to mechanically stripe the organic from the water molecule so with three mins, your killing it, I would say you could even go up to 500 GPH and still have better contact time then the best of the mega buck skimmers.

This should also bring the coefficient ratio up which will give you more times per day that the skimmer sees tanks worth of water. I think it will help with the bombardment also.


Mike

 

[Peppie]

Thanks for your time Mike. I like more flow!!! That will be better for my reactor also.

 

[wanareef]

Wow nothing new since 043012

So I finally got a 10" dia tube, 4.5' tall. I know that I need to make a box for it for the transition and drain a plate to hold the Hogg. Will be using the Commercial Air 5 pump for 88LPM of power, placed in the garage for noise.

Thinking about cutting the tube down to an even 48" with a transition to 6" at the 42" mark, then overflow to the cup. Mike, I stink at math problems that I can't see, so I have about three and a half feet, 10" dia tube of water that I want to replace about 14" or so inches of it with bubbles, correct? And for dwell time how many seconds will I need for the skimmer to accomplish it's intended job?

tia

 

[Peppie]

Wow nothing new since 043012

So I finally got a 10" dia tube, 4.5' tall. I know that I need to make a box for it for the transition and drain a plate to hold the Hogg. Will be using the Commercial Air 5 pump for 88LPM of power, placed in the garage for noise.

Thinking about cutting the tube down to an even 48" with a transition to 6" at the 42" mark, then overflow to the cup. Mike, I stink at math problems that I can't see, so I have about three and a half feet, 10" dia tube of water that I want to replace about 14" or so inches of it with bubbles, correct? And for dwell time how many seconds will I need for the skimmer to accomplish it's intended job?

tia

Wana,
First you need to figure out how many gallons of water are going to be in your reaction chamber (less your 20% air mix). Once you have done that then you need to know what size pump you are going to feed it with ( in GPH)
Example a 600 gal per hour pump will pump will pump 10 gal per min. and it will pump .16666 gal per sec
s ay for example your skimmer holds 30gal of water, so for all the water to pass thru your with a 600gph pump it will take 3mins.
Now comes the tricky part, you need to know how long it takes your bubbles to to get from the air stone to the top of your mixing chamber. From there you can figure out the rest of the equation for your bombardment rate and dwell time.

This is as I understand it . Mike will correct me if I am wrong!!!

 

[wanareef]

thanks peppie, gives me a base to go off of - math :smash:

 

[mojoreef]

ok if my math is right your going to get about 3.5 gallons per foot of 10 inch tube?? but that is a rough calculation.


Mike

 

[wanareef]

Mike

According to the calc - approx 12.24gals of water @ 36" of tube. The tube will be 48", 10" of it will have the transition, 6" neck then skimmate cup. So will approx 28" - 32" of tube or 10.21gals be enough water for a total volume of 275 gals?

Now is there that much room left in the sump??

 

[mojoreef]

So will approx 28" - 32" of tube or 10.21gals be enough water for a total volume of 275 gals?

Dont look at it that way Wana. the skimmer is the skimmer and the tank volume is its own beast. So work the numbers on the skimmer to make it do what it is supposed to do. So what is the dwell time in the mixing chamber of the skimmer?? the formula for that is the ammount of water the skimmer holds (10.21 gallon) divided by the amount of water being pushed by the pump feeding it. So here is an example you have a 600GPH pump feeding this skimmer, that works out to .167 gallons per SECOND. 10.21 (water in skimmer) dived by .167 gps = 61 seconds of contact time in your skimmer (which is pretty good).

Then you work the volume of air, your looking at 20 to 25% air volume in the skimmer, any more and the bubble join and thats not cool. So take the skimmer and turn it on with just the water and no air. take a measure from top to bottom and make a mark, then turn the air on, the air should rise between 20 and 25 percent up. So if you skimmer is 32 inches tall in the mixing chamber (place where air and water are mixing, not the foam column) the water level alone should be somewhere between 24 and 26 inches up the tube?? then when the air gets turned on it takes it to the 32 inch level.

Bombardment rate is a tough calculation but a simple way to figure it is to have you skimmer with just the water flowing inside it. then turn the air on just a very very tiny bit, then time the time it takes a bubble to go from the stone to the top of the mixing chamber, so in your case it probably going to be around 9 seconds, from their you take your contact time and divide it by the 9 seconds, so in the example we are using above 61 seconds of contact time divided by 9 second air dwell = 6.7 . A bombardment rate of 10 is deemed perfect, but its not something you need to grind out so dont put to much effort into making it perfect. but if you felt you had to your result would tell you you need to increase the contact time and thus would have to slow the water coming into the skimmer, lol

Ok from their you can stand back and say your skimmer is getting the kind of contact time, dwell time and bombardment rate it needs to skim out proteins and other DOC's NOW we can look at your question.

So will approx 28" - 32" of tube or 10.21gals be enough water for a total volume of 275 gals?

SO what you are asking is what is called a coefficient rate and this formula works on all equipment in you reef system. So the way it work is that you get a coefficient number of 9.2 as 9.2 means that 99.99% of the water gets treated in the tank. So you take you total water volume (275 gallons) and divided by the feed pump for your skimmer (lets say 600GPH again) and it = .46 and then multiply it by 9.2 which equals 4.21, and that is the time. So you would now know that all the water in your system will pass through the skimmer every 4.21 hours.

make sense or did I muddy it up more??? lol

Mike

 

[wanareef]

Thanks Mike - much clearer those are the formulas that I needed

more math :smash: