It cracks me up when I walk into someone's house and the windows are fogged all up and the place smells like a fish store! You gotta wonder what 30 years of extra moisture would do to a house.
Faz, The a 5g jug skimmer is actually a pretty cool idea. If you have the right tools and patience you could get a good skimmer for a great price. Really though, you want to copy/modify a working skimmer as opposed to starting from scratch the way I did. My first prototype was not good, but the second design was much better. This wasted both time and money. If you could find a working version, it would save lots of time and money. In the end I decided the skimmer would not fit properly on my fish shelf after I was just about done with it. Just re-worked the fish shelf and now I could probably get it to fit, but I've scavanged all the plumbing parts for other experiments.
I used a genX something or other needle wheel pump. It was a little undersized for that size skimmer. Also, my tool selection is pretty limited so my craftsmanship was not as good as I would have liked.. My guess is that you could put something like this together for under $100 minus the feed and re-circ pumps. Finding a source of cheap jugs would really help. I called one of the local water bottle companies in town and the lady was pretty rude when she found out I was planning on using her bottles as fish filters.
If you try it, just remember not to glue anything until it's fully tested, and don't even think of running this guy outside your sump. Uniseals might work great for thick plastic, but they can leak like a sieve when used on a 5g jug.
Actually I'm still looking for a good skimmer that will fit on my fish shelf. The one I have is probably a bit undersized. Should have just bought the ASM G3.
