completed gravity fed air driven CC skimmer

[bprewit]

Well time will tell if this thing will pull any gunk from the water but so far its looking good. I decided to try and run my skimmer with water direct from the tank overflow and not use a seperate pump to run the skimmer. I have a decent sized air pump running 2-3" air stones and built the skimmer body a total of 30" tall with 4" PVC. Water height adjustment is by raising or lowering the outlet tube height and flow control is by adjusting a valvle on the secondary discharge from the overflow. With some testing in a bucket the flow through the skimmer is somewhere around 300gph with about 700gph total flow coming from the tank. The remaining water from the overflow goes through a filter sock in the sump. I should know if it works by tomorrow hopefully.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/bprewit/tank%20equipment/skimmer006.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/bprewit/tank%20equipment/skimmer005.jpg

[bprewit]

well believe it or not it works! I plan on making a few changes tomorrow though. I currently have a mag 9 as a return pump and a mag 7 hooked to my closed loop. I am going to swap these two pumps around making my mag 9 the closed loop for circulation and put the mag 7 on the sump return. This should allow me to direct all water from the tank overflow through the skimmer and allow the skimmer to empty into my filter sock. I will try and flow around 350-400gph through the skimmer which should be enough flow and plenty through my sump as well. Hopefully this will let all the oily skum water from the tank to enter directly to the skimmer making it a bit more efficient.

[Henry]

Cool, don't you just love DIY projects that work.

[brewercm]

I believe that this is somewhat the same theory they have on the new Euroreef recirculation skimmers. They let the water feed into the skimmer like you have yours, but instead of using the airstones they have a pump that pulls water in from the bottom of the reaction chamber and pumps back into the chamber. You can see the setup good in the first picture on this page.


http://www.euro-reef.com/products-csseriesrc.shtml