SKIM-2 Aquarium Skimmer (Amazon): http://geni.us/w84p SKIM-2 Aquarium Skimmer (Ebay): https://ebay.to/2LYovKL Foams and Biohome Ultimate: http://www.filterpro.co.uk (FilterPro site has links to suppliers in other countries) This is a really well made, cheap little surface skimmer from All Pond Solutions that I would definitely recommend to anyone wanting a ready made surface skimmer to remove dust and scum from the water surface of an aquarium. APS say it is suitable for a tank up to 350 litres but I can see no reason why it wouldn't keep the surface of a larger tank clear since the effectiveness will ultimately depend on tank shape, water surface area and the currents in water created by the main tank filter.
Even the extreme scum layer that I had encouraged to build up for testing purposes was no match for this little skimmer and as it was under £10 delivered it seems senseless wasting time and money to make a DIY aquarium skimmer.
This skimmer is a SURFACE skimmer, not a PROTEIN skimmer so its purpose is to remove anything which settles on the water surface, keeping it clear and allowing for good gaseous exchange between the water of the aquarium and the atmosphere. I will cover protein skimmers in a separate video.
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Now in here we've got a rock filter.
It's actually a hollow rock, like a resin sort of ornament
that I made into a filter that I showed in a previous video.
But this video isn't about that
wonderful filter.
It's about some horrendous scum that is blighting the top of this tank
and it's something that hasn't happened by accident.
I've actually promoted this scum to grow
because I want to test a small skimmer to see how effective it is.
Now that is absolutely disgusting.
It's horrendous and if you've got something like that on top of
your water it's really going to affect the exchange between the water
and the atmosphere.
It's absolutely horrendous.
Your water really needs to be clear on the top. That has almost
like a sealing effect on it.
It kind of seals all the pollutants into the tank
that would otherwise just escape to the atmosphere.
Now you might wonder how I caused that to happen.
Well this little tank is in my back office. The
door to that would normally be shut
so it would be away from where we were packaging up all the
filter material and it would be away from all the dust.
I've left the door open purposefully
for about a month so all the dust from there
or at least an appreciable amount of the dust from there
It's come through, and it's settled on the water surface.
I've never scooped any of it off.
I've never made any attempt to clean it.
So that's a month's worth of scum on top of there.
It's grown beautifully.
And this is the thing that we're going to try and clear it with.
This is the Skim 2 Aquarium Surface Skimmer from All Pond Solutions.
Now, it's a very simple little thing.
It basically just sticks on the side of your tank.
It's got a small pump in here, which pumps water out.
It draws water in the top.
Through this little floating weir here
which has got slits in so your scum should go in there,
it'll drop down into some fine pad.
The fine pad will catch all the fine muck, all the scum,
all the oils and everything on the top
and then water will be spat out here and you've
got a venturi to aerate the water as well.
You can adjust the flow here with a dial.
So let's stick this in the tank,
I'll show you how it goes in, show it in operation,
hopefully show you some scum dropping into it
and then we'll see how long it takes to clear that
horrendous scum on the top.
Okay this right hand side seems to be the worst so we'll put it in
there.
I've got it all over my arm already.
Right we've got our floating
weir here, should allow the
scum to be sucked in there.
That's our fine pad, we should see the muck dropping down and catching
Catching in the fine pad when I switch it on.
Let's see. You can certainly see
the water going down there, and you
can certainly see the venturi effect.
It's actually quite noisy.
But if we adjust how much air it's sucking in,
that actually quietens it down a bit.
It's pretty silent. That's good.
Let's have a look inside the skimmer.
It is going down there.
You can definitely see bubbles
of scum going down.
Right, I've got the light off there,
and you can see just how much scum,
I want to call it smeg, but I better not call it smeg,
but about how much muck.
Has been dislodged by that pump.
There's all sorts of crap floating around in there.
Hopefully that will end up inside that foam
and it will end up being trapped.
I guess time will tell
but it's definitely sucking the scum in there.
Right I've just opened up the air intake that's
on the pump that's inside the big rock filter.
Hopefully that'll encourage the surface
to be a little bit more agitated
and will result in this horrible mess being drawn down.
Inside the skimmer. Now I can already see that that fine pad
in there has caught some of that smeggy stuff
So hopefully it'll get all of that.
How long it'll take is anybody's guess. I couldn't resist
This is about half an hour later
And you can see already a lot of the muck off the top has gone
Some of it has ended up in the water.
Look at that. That's not very clear at all
So it's obviously breaking it up.
With any luck eventually it will end up in the filter
Okay just a few notes on this particular little skimmer.
I got this one on Amazon,
link is in the video description.
It pumps approximately 300 liters per hour,
it's got the venturi, it comes with a little bit of fine pad
and it's also got that adjustable
height strainer as well which just floats up
with the surface of the water. But the best part is
I got this one delivered to my home for under 10 pounds.
That's a pretty good deal.
That works out maybe $11.50 or $12 or something like that.
That's pretty cheap and I know this video
is all over YouTube of people making DIY
surface skimmers and they work very very well.
Problem is the tenner look absolutely awful.
This actually looks pretty good
and by the time you bought a power head and put your bottle and
you know you've made
your DIY thing it probably cost you more than a tenner.
That's only a tenner and it's already done.
It's already there and you can just cut your own
little fine pads you know.
I wouldn't make a DIY one, not when I see how well that little fella's
working already. There's actually no scum anywhere
in the tank after an hour. Look at the sides,
totally clean. See where the rock meets the water,
totally clean and apart from all those
bubbles being generated by those two pumps there's
nothing organic floating around in the water.
Just a nation of bubbles, obviously you
wouldn't have that many bubbles around.
I've got both air intakes on both pumps turned
on so it looks pretty mad in there.
I think if you had fish in here they'd practically be breathing air,
they'd be struggling because there wasn't enough water in the water.
Water.
That concludes my little test
of this great little skimmer for under a tenner.
