My protein Skimmer doesn't work!

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Apr 2, 2004
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I have a Sea Clone purchased from liveaquaria.com and it's rated at 100 gallons. I was told by my LFS that I would be skimming tons of stuff off of my uncured live rock while I was curing all 45 lbs and cycling my tank at the same time.

Well after the 1 week initial break in of the skimmer, it is now almost a month old and still will not gather foam in the collection cup without throwing billions of bubbles into the tank.

I've been told that algea must grow on the inside first to keep the bubbles under control and I've been told to leave it off while I'm curing and cycling. (Even though my LFS told me I HAD to skim while I was curing) As of right now the skimmer is on, but the air intake is closed so only water is running through it, and no skimming is actually taking place.(trying to promote algea growth)
Thanks in advance and I love this site.
 
Moving to Marine DIY and Products.... OG

There is a break in period with skimmers, but I'm not sure it has anything to do with algae growth...

I wouldn't worry about running it during the cycle, unless you have lots of critters in there--in which running it and doing water changes both will help out.

Skimmers require quite a bit of fiddling to get running right. I'd put a baffle infront of the return to deal with bubbles, and then spend some time adjusting the amount of airflow to get it to the dry foam stage.
 
I think the skimmers need to break in because of different oils on the inside of the chamber that prevent good skim production, from the manufacturing process. This generally takes about a week to work itself out. On one of my skimmers it took even longer but the tank was not stocked heavy at all.

If your running the skimmer with no air it won't skim much of anything ofcourse, and it also depends on the amount of waste in the tank for it to skim. If you have nothing but rock in the tank and it was already partially cured, the tank just may not have much to skim.

I have been told you should skim if your curing rock however. If the rock has a lot of die off skimming will help pull the disolved organics out of the tank and lower your odds of having a serious algea outbreak.

I would probably play with the skimmer, open up the air valve all the way, adjust the water level if you can, and keep tweaking the adjustments over the course of a couple weeks to see what works, and be patient.

Just keep in mind, if the tank has nothing in it to be skimmed (no fish producing waste for example, or your live rock no having much die off while being cured), the skimmer won't have anything to work on to begin with.
 
I have a seaclone 150 and they can be finicky. (sic?) You have to adjust the venturi a bit to get production. Make sure that every day you check to see if you are producing foam. I completely close the air tube and then open it one full turn. Look at the column and see what the bubbles look like. They should cause a bit of foam at the top of the column. Every couple of days I have to readjust my skimmer. It's kind of a pain in the butt.

On a side note buy a couple of algae cleaning brushes and clean the thing when you empty the cup. It gets pretty nasty!:mad:
 
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