Volcano club

[Herpervet]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13498778#post13498778 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Sparkss
so is enkamat ozone resistant ? (I am sure that is answered in one of the mesh mod threads, but for the sake of my sanity I hoped someone here could answer that one). Also, I am guessing that the dart impellors are ordered through Sequence directly ? Or are there online vendors that actually stock and sell the parts/impellors ?

I think that we are going to tackle getting a stock impellor and modding it w/ mesh, as Hahn and a few others have recommended. That way I will still have the NW from Scott as a fall back option. Now I just need to source the parts and get them ordered

I believe I asked someone at Aquatic ecosystems and they told me it is nylon.

Nylon isn't ozone resisitant and will be melted away in short order.

 

[Nanook]

It is nylon.

 

[Sparkss]

*sigh*, so much for that plan.. thanks for letting me know before I got too far down that path

 

[reefrubble]

Isn't there some way you can keep Ozone from eating everything up ? Like may be degassing the water outside in the open air before exposing all rubber , and plastic items .

 

[Nanook]

FWIW, I wouldn't run ozone through a killer skimmer anyway.

 

[hahnmeister]

You could inject ozone into its own reactor that the incoming water goes through before the skimmer...

 

[Sparkss]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13500293#post13500293 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by reefrubble
Isn't there some way you can keep Ozone from eating everything up ? Like may be degassing the water outside in the open air before exposing all rubber , and plastic items .

Everything in the skimmer currently is already ozone "safe" (or as safe as anything is from ozone). I had a long conversation w/ Scott about ozone before setting it up, not to mention that I know of other Volcano owners who also inject ozone into their skimmers as well . And I don't dose in high amount anyways, although I can't speak for any of the others that use ozone .

 

[Herpervet]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13500293#post13500293 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by reefrubble
Isn't there some way you can keep Ozone from eating everything up ? Like may be degassing the water outside in the open air before exposing all rubber , and plastic items .

Yes, however the simplest means to inject ozone is through the air input into the skimmer.

Otherwise you need an ozone reactor or a separate, ozone safe skimmer.

The volcano is ozone safe but the mesh mod isn't and if you inject ozone directly into the mesh wheel it will melt the mesh.

 

[Sparkss]

I "tuned" the skimmer to 130w at lunch today, but I think that I need to 1. clean the neck again and 2. adjust the water level a little higher (but I don't want to do this until I clean the skimmer and can better see what I am actually doing ).

 

[saleencobra]

Does anyone have a muffler idea to quite it down. It is so loud coming out of the overflow you can clearly hear the gurgling at my neighbors house.

 

[Sparkss]

I re-read Volcano1's post and went back and adjusted our recirc down to 125~126. Also, to answer your question Volcano1, yes, your dimensions sound like they match what Scott considers an 1860. Technically ours is an 1850 or so now since we had a second, shorter, body made, to match our setup (height was/is important since we gravity feed the skimmer). If we ever changed to using a feed pump I would put the old, taller, body back on. If I got really nutty (and had tons of head room) I would combine both bodies for a very tall skimmer (neat as that idea sounds, the logistics of maintaining, cleaning and supporting that tall of a skimmer is just not worth it ).

 

[Sparkss]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13502486#post13502486 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by saleencobra
Does anyone have a muffler idea to quite it down. It is so loud coming out of the overflow you can clearly hear the gurgling at my neighbors house.

well, we do the "big no-no" and have the output pipe end about 1/2" below the waterline of our sump. The only impact I have seen is that it raises the waterline w/in the skimmer a fair bit, but we have it low enough that there is still plenty of "adjustment" room left.

 

[prostaff]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13498348#post13498348 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Herpervet
So what is the diameter and heigth of the neck on your diy skimmer? That's alot of air you're pushing.

DIY skimmer
Body 14dia x 45tall
Cone 5in tall
NECK 4.5dia X 13tall
Never heard of 4.5 in dia arylic tube but that is what I measure. Got some help from a friend making the cone and neck. This skimmer was fed with an 800g/h pump and had the alita 100 going full blast thru it. It was quite turbulent the first when the airstones where brand new but within 3 or 4 days it had some serious fine foam going

 

[Herpervet]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13505206#post13505206 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by prostaff
DIY skimmer
Body 14dia x 45tall
Cone 5in tall
NECK 4.5dia X 13tall
Never heard of 4.5 in dia arylic tube but that is what I measure. Got some help from a friend making the cone and neck. This skimmer was fed with an 800g/h pump and had the alita 100 going full blast thru it. It was quite turbulent the first when the airstones where brand new but within 3 or 4 days it had some serious fine foam going

Interesting. How many stones /type/size are you using?

 

[Sparkss]

ok, update on my tuning efforts for our Volcano.

After a good cleaning, including scraping the inside of the cone w/ an acrylic scraper (an old Kent brand one I think) It turns out that when I had the gate valve on the output closed off a little it really wasn't enough to have any affect on the water level within the skimmer. When I shut off the air pump and let it settle down then opened the gate valve all the way up, the water level didn't change any (oh well ). It is pretty good where it is though, so I am fine w/ that.

I had a head of foam w/in 30 mins, or less, and even a little skimmate collected. I also played around w/ the O3 dosing and found that when I cranked up the dosage the foam head would collapse. To be honest I didn't think I had enough O3 going into there to have that effect. I backed it off to a little more than half what I had it set at before and the foam head built back up.

One other thing that I noticed was that our food would cause the foam head to collapse, but I already knew that (we feed "home made" frozen foods). What I didn't know was the extent and what else was going on. I left it for 4 hours and checked back and it was still not producing, not even close. A closer inspection revealed that the food had impacted the surface tension to the point where the recirc pump had started cavitating (and never returned to normal operation on it's own). I shut off the air pump for jsut a couple of seconds then turned it on again and everything returned to "normal", which was a skimmer pretty full of fine little bubbles. It started skimming out some bigger pieces while I stood there watching.

So far I am pretty happy w/ the results, and can only blame my lack of proper maintenance on a total lack of time for the tank lately *sigh* . But time will tell if the skimmer starts performing as I expect of it.

I plan to do two things tomorrow, first I want to remember to check the wattage draw when I feed the tank tomorrow, to see how low it goes and at what point it starts to cavitate. Then I will need to adjust the "run" rate to be the 125 target + whatever additional I need to keep it out of the "cavitation range" when I feed. That or I need to cycle the air pump each time after I feed (not really an option).

 

[Sparkss]

a bit of an update this morning. I awoke to a cavitating pump, so I cycled the air pump and almost immediately had a head of foam reaching close to the top of the neck. So I adjusted the recirc back up to around 128~129 and will see what happens. Now I question my previous assertion that the food had played a role in pushing the pump to cavitate, and maybe it did, but now I don't think so, not to the degree that I had previously.

So now I wonder if my problems previously were that I had it over tuned or under tuned (depending on what I tried to do with the skimmer that day). The skimmer is at the back end of the "fish room" area, so, even while it is pretty big, it is not "right in my face" whenever I happen to be out checking the equipment. I am making more of an effort to check it a couple of times a day, at least until I get it stabilized. Feeding time will be an interesting test also.

I will say that even though it seems to be performing alot better (when I can keep it above the cavitation point) the skimmer bubble density is no where near the "looks like PVC" level. But as long as it skims well, I really don't care . Once I get it all stabilized and "producing" I may start looking at ways to increase it's performance, but first I need to get it up to that operational baseline before I go trying to change anything major.

 

[jnarowe]

you could also put the water flow or air flow on a feed timer. some people shut down the water feed with a valve when they feed. I can't do that because I would forget but there are ways to automate that.

 

[jnarowe]

hmmm...so much tuning needed. I really am surprised. But when I built my own Sequence anti-NW I had the same trouble.

 

[Sparkss]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13507038#post13507038 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by jnarowe
you could also put the water flow or air flow on a feed timer. some people shut down the water feed with a valve when they feed. I can't do that because I would forget but there are ways to automate that.

I had thought about that..just adding that to the feed timer on our controller, but I don't use the feed timer now, and being an in-wall tank the controller is no where near the front of the tank where I feed from, so I ruled that option out (for now anyways ). And if I tried to do it manually, like you, I would invariably forget, probably more times then I would remember

 

[Sparkss]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13507168#post13507168 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by jnarowe
hmmm...so much tuning needed. I really am surprised. But when I built my own Sequence anti-NW I had the same trouble.

Once I get it dialed back in I will let it run for a month or two to see how well it performs. To be blunt, the only skimmate I have seen in over a month was what I cleaned out of the skimmer neck last night (and that wasn't that much). I also suspect now that I had been dosing too much O3 and that had been partly responsible for the skimmate "shutdown". Hopefully I can find that sweet spot for all of the valves and options, or at the very least some middle ground where they can all play nice together .

And I don't know if I mentioned this or not, but when I cleaned the skimmer last night I also re-directed the inlet fitting inside the skimmer (it is a 2" 45 fitting). It had ben pointed more or less down the center-front of the skimmer. I turend it to more of an angle (it now sets up a little bit of a "spin" in the body versus jsut crashing against the wall of the skimmer). I matched the direction w/ the ouput rotation in the bubble chamber underneath the bubble plate (caused by the output of the dart).

So I have changed quite a few "settings", based on what I saw going on w/in our skimmer and suggestions and shared experiences from this thread.

1. Cleaned neck and cone (usually only clean the neck - and the cone really needed cleaning)
2. Tuned dart to ~130w
3. Reduced O3 by 50% (down to about 50 mg/hr)
4. Adjusted inlet fitting to match skimmer water flow (turned the 45 inside the skimmer)

Water level was already set to just below the twist lock, although if I wanted to I could take it up another 1/2" - 1", but for now it is fine.

I will try to take some pictures, but right now my web hosting is having issues, so the pictures may need to wait.