Jason, lately people tend to get the biggest skimmer they can afford or fit in their systems, as skimmers get larger, ether in diameter, height, or both, in order to keep up with the head pressure pumps have to be bigger, a down fall in some cases is turbulence, so bubble plats are added to lower the turbulence inside the body.
Many people consider a counter current skimmer (tall narrow body with water entering at the top, passing slowly through air bubbles normally produced by air stones and exiting at the bottom) the most efficient out there and from past experiences, so do I.
A problem with these skimmers is the maintenance, air stones get clogged very fast, air pumps often blow their diaphragms and are noisy, the bigger you go in size the bigger this problem becomes.
Now one of the reasons these skimmers work well, is because there is very little turbulence inside them, when bubbles move to fast or keep bumping in to things, the proteins and all the gunk will have a hard time attaching to the bubbles, from this comes the theory for “low turbulenceâ€Â
One thing you have to watch out for in a larger body, is if the bubbles move to slow, they will start to attach to each other, becoming to big there for losing their optimal size, to avoid this, you will need to keep them moving in a orderly fashion, from this comes the theory for “tangential movement†this will also allow for the bubbles to take a little longer to reach the top, spending more time in the skimmer.
Octavio
