Coralife Super Skimmer 125

[fishylittlenemo]

Hello everyone, I'm posting this thread in regards to my friend. He's having problems with his protien skimmer. As the subject says its a Coralife Super Skimmer 125. He's having two problems, the one is the bubbles that go up the column to the cup on the top of the skimmer isn't constant. And the second one is annoying him the most and that is micro bubbles flowing out of the outlet when it comes out into the box. He had to do a quite abit of mods on it to get it to work decent but it hasn't fixed the problem. To keep in mind he had the thing running for a month now. He has live rock in there, its broken in now. Now for my curious mind....if you guys go and search for that protien skimmer, that outlet box i call it, does that have to be sumurged in the water completely or just in there alittle bit with the top stickin out about an 1/2 inch ? Whatever suggestions or ideas...i'm sure he won't mind them lol. Thanks again.


Fishylittlenemo

[pkremer]

This is just a guess, but I'm going to say you do NOT want the diffuser completely submerged. The whole point of the diffuser is to stop those little bubbles from getting into the aquarium, and if it is submerged, those bubbles can just flow right out the top and into the aquarium. The idea is to have those bubbles flow through the sponges before they get into the aquarium water.

I've noticed the same thing, that the bubble flow isn't perfectly constant, but it hasn't been a huge deal for me...

Paul

[fishylittlenemo]

Alright I had that in my mind what its not submurged. I just wanted to check for my curiousity. I'm just wondering why he's been having problems with the skimmer. But thanks alot for the info.

Fishylittlenemo

[ColdFish]

I have the CLSS 125 also and have seen many threads regarding the microbubble problem with it. Mine is new and not in the sump yet. My tank is just cycling with LR now and I haven't gotten around to installing the skimmer yet. I've taken the diffuser and placed it into the sump just to get an idea of how I'm going to place the skimmer. The problem that I see is that there just doesn't seem to be a good way to hang the diffuser that will get it positioned where you would want it. At least not in my sump anyway. If I hang it on the side of the sump it will sit too high, and if I hang it on the back of the baffle leading to the return chamber it will sit too low. I've been playing with the idea of using plastic wire ties and securing it directly to the skimmer body at the proper height, but the drawback to that will be that I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to get the whole unit into/out of the sump if it's all in one piece. It's a large skimmer and my space is tight. Would really like to hear what other people have done with it

[pkremer]

I had the microbubble problem too, fishylittlenemo, and I posted how I corrected the problem in this thread:

http://www.aquariumadvice.com/viewtopic.php?t=74136

[ColdFish]

My problem seems to have cleared up on it's own. The skimmer is not throwing out all the microbubbles anymore. I did have to let it run for a couple days producing tons of wet foam though. Finally I got tired of emptying the collection cup all the time, so I hooked up the supplied tubing to the drain hole in the cup and just let the skimate run into a 5 gallon bucket that I placed in front of the tank. It finally settled down and as it did the microbubbles went away.

As far as placement of the diffuser box, mine is not in the water at all. I have the bottom of the box about half an inch above the sump water level. Had to do it that way because I use a 20H as a sump and the supplied hanger won't go deep enough to get it down in the water. I was trying suction cups to get it lower but was having overflow issues (backpressure?) with it partially submerged. Since it's setting up higher now, I had to trim the output hose pretty short in order to leave that required 1" between the bottom of the output and the filter pad. Seems that it's working as it's supposed to now.