Skimmer No Longer Skimming

[windyridge]

I have an ASM Mini G skimmer that has been working great for several months now. All of a sudden I noticed that the bubbles are no longer overflowing into the cup and they are perfectly white and not dirty as before. The only things that have happened to the tank are: we changed over from tap to RODI (gradually with top off water and water changes so that it's probably all RODI now), and last Wednesday I added some Selcon to a feeding and forgot to rinse it off. But that was 6 days ago. What can be going on?

 

[spieszak]

Is that the one that uses the airstone? Possible its time to replace the airstone? Other than that, I'm sure someone with more experience will chime in.

 

[windyridge]

no air stone

 

[Felixc395]

How are your nutrients? Algae?

My skimmer skims the best when simply there is something to skim. I started carbon dosing and now the skimmer goes insane!

Maybe some more details on your system would be beneficial. Did you do a large water change recently?

 

[Toddrtrex]

Make sure that the venturi intake (( both the air tube and the plastic part )) are clear of salt creep.

This is from an 1GX, but yours should be similar (( this is from when I was opening the air intake a bit more, but this is the part that will get clogged with salt creep ))

 

[windyridge]

There's plenty of bubbles, they are just nice clean white ones and they are barely spilling over into the cup. As far as my nutrient levels go, the switch over to RODI is recent so I imagine there is significant phosphates in the live rock still. My levels per the test I use are 0.025. I have some hair algae on the piece of rock in the tank but the rest are hair algae free. I have coralline algae on all my rocks. What other info would you like?

Todd I will check the intake but as I said, there is no shortage of clean bubbles. I can't possibly have no junk to skim...can I? :eek1: The tank is about 6 months old now and still has some diatoms on the sand.

 

[windyridge]

Ok I guess my tank really is pretty clean, check out this pic. I cleaned out the cup so I could see in and if you look at the top of the cup there are dots of a dirty deposit so I guess it's working and there are plenty of bubbles. Just never saw this before.


DSC_0004 by onaridge2000, on Flickr