How often do you guys clean out your protein skimmer???

R

ReeferItIs2

New member
My tank has almost been running for 5 months now and my hob skimmer has alot of brown stuff in it...I don't know if I should clean it or not...don't even know what my first step would be to even clean...
 
Take the collection cup off dump the nasty stuff down the drain and then rinse the collection cup out very well with tap water dry off and put it back pn easy peezy
 
Oh well same process let it run through with some hot water and vingar. White distiled vinigar nothing else. Then after its really clean rinse it sgain and again to get vinigar out and u are good to go
 
If you have a day you do a heavy feeding I would clean it out after that cause your skimmer will kind of need to break in again. Personally I don't clean it out completely. Just wipe off what I can and rinse out whatever I can with a hose, then I let it run in some or water completely submerged.
 
Can I just vacuum out the brown stuff in my skimmer?? I don't think i want to go thru the whole break in process again if i can avoid it
 
Whatever is in your skim cup just empty it. Don't need a clean skim cup all the time to be honest. Unless you like looking at it. I'd just clean the neck once it's gunked up with skim otherwise just drain the cup. No need to be extra super clean with a skimmer. Also the skim you aim for will tell you if you need to empty it more or not. If your going for wet your going to empty faster etc...
 
So the brown stuff building up in the skimmer itself is OK to stay??? I clean my skim cup every couple days it's on the wet side
 
I have the cpr backpack 2r+...The skimmer I was looking for is for my next tank...i have 7 tanks total with freshwater fish in them...I'm switching them all over to reef tanks except 2 of my tanks that have breeding pairs of electric blue jack dempseys and platinum jack dempseys
 
I agree with what the guys above say on cleaning it. It can be done numerous ways.

Myself I do a good full cleaning at least once a year to prolong the life of the pump and purge the detritus that has settled in it. If the detritus builds up heavily it can and will start to pollute the water to an extent. If you can syphon it out I say go for it. If not wait for a time your ready to break it down to clean it or you notice it start to not perform the same.
 
Dapg8gt said:
I agree with what the guys above say on cleaning it. It can be done numerous ways.

Myself I do a good full cleaning at least once a year to prolong the life of the pump and purge the detritus that has settled in it. If the detritus builds up heavily it can and will start to pollute the water to an extent. If you can syphon it out I say go for it. If not wait for a time your ready to break it down to clean it or you notice it start to not perform the same.
Click to expand...

I think I will do the same...Once a year sounds good to me
 
You clean the inside of your skimmer body?! Nice. Wanna do mine? :D

I think I've done mine once in like 8 years, when I was running a light on the sump to grow chaeto and got some coraline growth inside the skimmer.
 
So basically it's not a necessity, that's a relief...it's kind of a sore eye though since it's a hob...no re and more reason for my next setup to have a sump
 
A CPR bakpak probably works slightly different compared to euroreef skimmer bodies. I used to have CPRBP generation1.

First, it may be undersized for your tank??

On my euroreef, the neck area inside the main body can get caked with gunk. So occasionally I will scrape the inside as best I can.

Just like in your collection cup neck area... Too much collected skin mate (gunk) can prevent bubbles from rising successfully up neck to be collected. That is why definitely clean your cup's neck. And occasionally clean your "main body" neck.

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As for converting all ur tanks to reef... Sounds like bad idea. There is a lot more maintenance (I feel) compared to freshwater.

Topoff, mixing salt water, checking salinity, weekly water changes, dosing, etc...

That's why most of us have only a couple tanks at most. Sounds like you are going to have like 5+ tanks.
 
My tank is only a 20 gallon so hopefully the cpr is not undersized, it seems to be doing the job right hopefully lol but I do see the gunk your talking about in the neck and I just wiped that down the other day for the first time...about the 5+ tanks you might be right but I'm only going to do one at a time and I'll go with the flow from there...but if I do a sump setup that would be 2 tanks for 1...i really don't know, everything is still up in there air as of now
 
Clean the neck every week to two weeks. Deep clean the whole unit once a year.

I have tunze 9002.
 
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