skimmer reeflo orca 200 problems

[Ganzel]

Hello all, I came home today to find about 5-7 gallons of water on my floor, my sump pump running dry. It had only been an hour maximum so there was no real big damage to anything. The skimmer was overflowing with bubbles but flowing down like water in the cup.I turned the skimmer off, I turned the open/close exit valve to full open like when you have the skimmer at first and wait for it to break in. So I adjusted the air intake and the water exit valve to the minimum. Now it is skiimming again but behaves strangely. It will make bubbles for 5 minutes, not really thick foam but more like bubbles from soap, and then it will fall to the water level line. It will then start back again, the foam will rise, it will "ejeect a bit more" stay like this, and then suddenly drop again. it had never done anything like this before. There is even foam escaping from the top lid. It was thight before, but now the bubbles seem to find a way out by the top instead of going down my drain like they should. I tested the drain with water and it flows perfectly to the bottom bucket.

Any help / input would be greatly appreciated as this is very stressfull to me and my tank. It is actually 2h am where I live and I've past the last 4 hours trying to solve this problem without any luck.

Many thanks to reefcentral for putting this forum together.

Ganzel

 

[tkeracer619]

Make sure to clean all the air intake parts. If that isn't the problem I would take the volute of the pump apart and make sure everything is clean.

 

[Ganzel]

could it be that my drain valve was a little stuck in dirt and that the restricted flow out caused kind of a syphon effect? I also noticed there is foam coming from the side of the cover of the collection cup, it wasn't doing so before, it feels like there is too much air pressure coming from the bubbles compared to what can go out by the drain.

What do you think?

Thank you for the fast answer!

 

[tkeracer619]

The drain needs to be unrestricted. I would clean anything that is suspicious.

 

[Ganzel]

I've just put a glass of water in the collection cup to see how the drain would react. It drains perfectly without any restrictions, it just seem dirty from algae on the sides... What is the cleaning cycle of a skimmer? I should clean it every monteh? 3 months ? 6 months? once a year?