study on skimmer performance
 

So basically all skimmers will remove the max amount of 30-35% organics butv the rate at which it does this will vary depending on the size of skimmer?

Great article, i guess putting all money in high end skimmer is a waste :-)

Unless your using other factors to justify the money spent.....like how many times you need to throw the skimmer off your deck before it starts to work properly :razz:

Good article, but didn't account for enough break-in for the high end skimmers in my opinion. After a full clean it takes 2-3days for mine to get going, and higher end ones take even longer in many cases. They gave it 24 hours, so that will benefit the skimmers with the least amount of surface.

But a good study, good that we have a way of measuring skimmer performance, and interesting to see the results.

skimmer
 

yes,
the size also doesn't matter because the skimmers are on 24/7 the will skim but some faster and some slower.

Unless you have fish that constantly poop more than normal

In many cases high-end means high-end pump. All these things blow bubbles but after dealing with the crap pump on my swc I'd rather have a solid pump getting me my 30% removal than my crap pump which I need to babysit to make sure it's even ON lol.

In a closed system with no TOC generation, a skimmer will only remove 30% and bigger skimmers will remove it faster, however, in the manner in which we run them (ie. continuously) the bigger skimmer WILL WORK BETTER because it will remove the labile TOC faster than the others. For example, if the rate of removal of the labile TOC is greater than the rate of labile TOC generation there will be no accumulation; however, if your skimmer is undersized you won't be removing the labile TOC as fast as they are generated and you will have TOC build up.

The rate of removal becomes even more important if you are running carbon dosing systems, such as vodka dosing, where you are converting the refractory TOC (that is otherwise not removed by a skimmer) to biomass in the form of bacteria. Since you would then be able to remove all of the TOC, not just the labile TOC, the equations they use become skewed. In this situation you will need an oversized skimmer to keep up with removal demands as removable products increase from 30% to anywhere from 65% to 80% (not all TOC is converted to biomass since the bacteria produce CO2 during metabolism, assuming all TOC is consumed by bacterial metabolism).

I wouldn't say that this article says spending a ton on a high end skimmer is a waste but (break issues described above aside) it makes the case for oversizing your skimmer. They didn't show suspended solid removal (ie. bacteria removal) in these tests at all. The high end skimmers that produce smaller bubbles in high quantities will remove organic suspended solids much faster than a POS skimmer will. So again, since we are running in a continuous manner, rate and size become important.

Thus endth the first class of ScubaSteve's water filtration tutorial. Please leave your apple for the teacher on your way out and don't let the door hit you on the @ss as you leave:wink:

Till next week's class:biggrin: