A tale of 6 skimmers.

[djtodd]

OK, so I started out in this hobby 2.5 years ago, and I seem to have gone through a skimmer every 6 months or so. The following are *my* experiences, and my opinions.

First off was my old 20G tank, and I needed a skimmer for it. Luckily Paul_BB had an old BakPak kicking around, and I was off to the races. Returned some bubbles, but some filter floss stuffed in the output helped a lot. It actually didn't skim too badly, but the Rio pump driving it made me nervous, and I had some cash so I moved to...

A Remora. Which IMHO never really skimmed all that well. This was probably no fault of the skimmer as I hadn't learned the "keep your hands out" rule yet. Both units suffered from the poor design of the collection cup with the rubber band method of adjusting it. Never found that to be even remotely accurate or easy to adjust.

After a while a 20 just wasn't big enough, so I moved to a nicely drilled 40 with a 40 sump. The Remora didn't cut it anymore, so I picked up the Pacific Coast predecessor to the Coralife SuperSkimmer. Now that one actually worked rather well, especially considering that I hadn't grasped the concept of placing the NW pump next to the drain to get as much of the nice surface skimmed water from the display. The pump had a tendency to not want to re-start after stopping it for whatever reason though.

Last October I moved to my current 90G tank, and I decided that it was time to move up to a non-cheapo skimmer and got my hands on an ASM G2. I came away hating the thing. For one, the Sedra pump was a POS that was totally inconsistant in it's output. One day Mr. Wilson was over and saw how sometimes it filled the entire body with bubbles, and sometimes it wouldn't. The skimmer overflowed at the drop of a hat, and the build quality was below that of even the cheapo CSS. From what I've heard the G3 was a better unit with a better matched Sedra pump to it. I still came away from this vowing to never use another Sedra NW, and thats why I never bothered with a Euroreef.

Ditched the ASM and decided to give an Aqua-C EV180 a try. You know what? They're darn good skimmers for the money. It pulled out a fair amount of junk, far more than the ASM. Still, it required a power hungry MAG7 to run it, and people reported that it worked far better with a gated MAG9 or Eheim 1262. The only real drawback to this unit was the fact that it stopped skimming for too long a time after feeding or putting your hands in.

Last week I browsed through the classifieds and picked up an H&S A110-F2000. I was dubious. How could it be that different from the ASM? A NW is a NW right? Wrong. The Aquabee is smaller, quieter, and only draws 18W. An hour after I dumped it in the sump this thing was pulling out a lot of crud. When I checked it this morning (48 hours after it was last cleaned) I noted that I'd definately have to clean it again tonight. Originally I thought it might be a little undersized for my setup, but I may be wrong.

In conclusion, from my experiences, some of the cheap skimmers worked rather well for the money. The CSS and the BakPak aren't as bad as you'd think. The hype for the expensive units like H&S and Deltec may very well be justified, time will tell.