Skimmer & Melafix are not friends.

Ok... so long story short. I had my skimmer setup and running (Coral Life Super Skimmer) and it was working great. It broke in for 2-3 days and then I made the adjustments in the instructions on what to do after break in. All was going good. Well my damsel has always had a little bit of fin rot by his left eye. (I blame it on him being so uptight.) Anyway I decided to add some melafix (i know, i know, hindsight is 20/20). This caused my skimmer to go nuts, overflow, spew microbubbles all over the place into my tank. Nothing I could do adjustment wise seemed to fix it.

I read up around the web about it and in turn have done the following:

Added Carbon to my media trays to help filter out the melafix, made about a 10-12% PWC.

It's been a couple days, so.. I pulled the skimmer, cleaned it out just in case it had melafix residue or something in it and plugged it back in. It doesn't overflow anymore and seems to be able to skim but the defuser where the water runs back into the tank is still spewing microbubles everywhere.

Should I wait a few more days until all of the melafix is filtered out? or... Should I let the skimmer run and see if it balancers out?

Thoughts?

Subliminal said:

Whenever I cleaned my superskimmer, it would release massive amounts of microbubbles for a little while.

Actually, I found if I never put my hands into my tank, my superskimmer released no microbubbles.

And now that I've gotten a little more experienced with the whole reef keeping thing, I really don't ever put my hands in the tank unless something gets knocked over...but I adjusted my CUC to smaller beasties, so they don't really knock much over.

Anyway, sorry for the tangent.

Click to expand...

How long is a little while? Hour or 2? I havn't left it on very long since it started doing that.

Should I let the skimmer run or just wait it out a few more days and then try?

As an update, for those who might later find this thread. I hooked the skimmer back up (since it was at least skimming) and the micro bubble problem went away slowly. I left it running for 4-5 hours and most of them were gone by the end of the day. This morning they are near non existant. So I guess for me the solution was to just let it keep running (as long as its not overflowing.)