Another Turboflotor tip

Occassionally my Turboflotor Multi freaks out and starts filling the cup over night. I just went through this and was scatching my head... initially I always thought that there must be something going on in my tank that was freaking it out.

But this time after cleaning the cup I did something different. I put my finger over the hole on the air-silencer. This removed the air and I was able to see that the water level in fact was really high. It really shouldn't be because the pump and outputs were where they are supposed to be.


After a few seconds I released my finger and allowed air to come in, this seemed to 'loosen' something up and the water level returned to normal.

I am psyched. That is an easy fix. I hope that helps someone else.

 

funny, I woke up this morning to find that 2 of my protein skimmers both prisms (a pro and a small one) had gone wild over night I usually find that this happens when there is a drastic climate change IE. sudden cool weather, drying out after several days of rain,etc to fix them I have to readjust them
With the prisms I always figured that changes in air density caused this. When I get home tommorow I am going to strip them down and look for gunk.
Thanks for the idea

 

Thanks an interesting observation. I do seem to notice some weirdness when I leave the top off at night for prolonged periods.

This skimmer is awesome when it is dialed in, but it seems to have dark periods where it's really grumpy and spastic. Kind of like me! The achilles heel is that in my case the pump appears to be stronger that the output can handle sometimes. I feel the adustment knobs on the output pipes do not have a sufficient range - I wish I could open them up further. One solution would be to order another pair of adjustment knobs and break off the stem - making them merely caps that would provide full output. But then I lose any adjustment at all. Another possibility would be to put a ball valve on the pump itself. This is probably the route I will go if I have to. It is weird. I will have this thing behaving for over a month, then it will have a bad week. hmmm....

My 'fix' appears to be only temporary, as it started raising the water level again after a while. ugh. I need to figure this out. EDIT - Acutally.. my second run with this tip this morning appears to be holding out. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

 

I got a idea about what might be going on. My Coralife skimmer your Turboflotor skimmer and the Prizm for that matter are all "Hang on the Back" skimmer. To be a HOB skimmer they have to be plumbed up and out the tank. The water swirls around in the skimmer then it pumped back up and over and into the tank. The Coralife skimmer has a tiny little hole to break the suction of the water fall back in to the tank. If that get clogged up with salt creep or anything else it causes a suction to be created. That makes the skimmer surge, the water level changes rapidly. It cause a few people Coralife skimmers to over flow. The fix on the CSS was to remove output hose and replace it with a 1" PVC Tee and plumb it as need be. I just a thought on the Turboflotor but I think that was the real purpose of those "bubble traps" on the Multi. If I remember the prizm just run over a lip back into the tank so it doesn't mean anything for you KB. All HOB skimmers have to get around this Matt so it is just a thought.

 

Yeah Covey, that was one of the first things I thought of and I cleaned the traps. They seemed fine. So that's when I started messing with the air line. My skimmer is dialed in again and behaving, so perhaps my 'fix' was it and the issue was related to the air intake. Thanks for the posts, that sure makes me think about all this a little differently.

 

My prisim overflowed on monday
I was at work but my wife called me to tell me it was raining in my kitchen cabinets
I went home had to dismantle the tank to move it so I could suck the water out of the carpet The fish are in a QT in the basement the corals are all in the 125
I just put the finishing tuches on the NEW SUMP I will refill the tank on sat and load the fish back in mid-week who knows how long before I can load in the corals The worst part is all the coraline On the glass I lost. NO MORE HANG ONS FOR ME!!

 

Ugh. SOrry to hear that K.B. what a drag!

 

Matt, you and I have been talking turbofloater over PM some...I thought it would be good to post this on the forum, but here is the pic I said I would take..my skimmer seems to be working now how I had "expected" it to now that I have moved my pump up off the floor of the tank! Thanks for the tip Here are some pics of the pump and skimmate

 

That looks perfect! Nice. 8)

 

Those prizm skimmers are prone to overflowing. I had one that used to do the same thing. The skimmer would over skim occasionally and the collection cup would overflow. My advice would be to buy a better skimmer.