I'm fairly frustrated this morning. Wednesday night I went to bed after topping off the 75gl tank. Thursday morning I got up and the pumps were chugging up air because the skimmer had emptied everything down to the bottom. A few more minutes and the pumps would have been sucking up air.
I added enough to get me through the day as I didn't have time to get it to the proper salinity. Got home and did a proper top-off, then I turned the skimmer back on and watched it for a while. It seemed fine. I even cleaned the top chamber of it just to be sure. Sometimes they work a little bit too efficiently when they're dirty.
So about two hours later I found that my water line had fallen way down again. Skimmer was working overtime again.
So my question is this: is my skimmer working properly and legitimately getting rid of bad materials or is it malfunctioning? Typically it takes about a week to half-fill a 2 liter soda bottle and the water is black. This water was fairly clean.
It has done this before and then stopped after a few hours. I would make an adjustment to the air intake, but if it is working properly I think I should just let it run. Biggest problem is that I'm running out of RO water to top off with.
One thing I should point out is that my skimmer return feeds my refugium via a 3/4" tube. The return is really too much so I cut a couple of holes in the tubing to allow some water to empty out before getting into the refugium. I'm not sure if that would have anything to do with this or not. I got one fish recently, but it was only a royal gramma and I doubt that would put out this much extra waste.
I added enough to get me through the day as I didn't have time to get it to the proper salinity. Got home and did a proper top-off, then I turned the skimmer back on and watched it for a while. It seemed fine. I even cleaned the top chamber of it just to be sure. Sometimes they work a little bit too efficiently when they're dirty.
So about two hours later I found that my water line had fallen way down again. Skimmer was working overtime again.
So my question is this: is my skimmer working properly and legitimately getting rid of bad materials or is it malfunctioning? Typically it takes about a week to half-fill a 2 liter soda bottle and the water is black. This water was fairly clean.
It has done this before and then stopped after a few hours. I would make an adjustment to the air intake, but if it is working properly I think I should just let it run. Biggest problem is that I'm running out of RO water to top off with.
One thing I should point out is that my skimmer return feeds my refugium via a 3/4" tube. The return is really too much so I cut a couple of holes in the tubing to allow some water to empty out before getting into the refugium. I'm not sure if that would have anything to do with this or not. I got one fish recently, but it was only a royal gramma and I doubt that would put out this much extra waste.