Surface Skimmer for JBJ Nano

[Ducman996]

Well....I have been doing a lot of thinking about how to keep the surface of my nano cube clean. I decited to make a surface skimmer. I haven't see this by anyone else here to here is what I have done so far.

I went to Home Depot and got some clear acrylic scraps ($0)
I decided to model it after the external overflows that I have see around.
Next I cut all the pieces to make a box that is 4.25 inch by 3 inches by 1 inch thick.
I haven't decited how I am going to allow the water to flow into the box yet. There are two ideas that I have in my head.....either use a dremel and make slots at the top of the box or just drill holes near the top. I think that drilling the holes may be eazyer but I will dry both methods on some scrap that I have left.

My plan is to fix it to thee front of the slots that flow in to the back part of the tank. I haven't done this part of it, but will in the next day or so.

enclosed is a picture of the overflow box. I will take more pictures as I install it in to the tank.

 

[Anonymous]

Ducman,
http://reefs.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t ... ox+acrylic

It works great. FWIW, it's not even really necessary to glue it to the back. The water pressure will hold it on. I used epoxy for frags on mine to glue it in place as the tank was already filled with water. Also, I never cut slots in it, I just left the top smooth and put a little screening inside of it to keep out fish. The JBJ has the screen already, so I think you could install that baby as is.

You need more furniture!! Did you just move in?

 

[Ducman996]

Here it is finally installed. So far it seems to be working great.

And yes....I know that the glass is really dirty. It has to be cleaned.

 

[Anonymous]

Seems like the water line doesn't have much room to move. Are you worried about running dry? I suppose the nano doesn't have much evap, so that lessens the risk...

 

[cain]

Did you epoxy it into place or just let the water hold it there?

 

[Ducman996]

I used aquarium silicon.

 

[SaltyMist]

I think it'd take a lot of evaporation before this ran dry.

My thinking on this is that the pump in the sump is at the bottom of the tank, and so as evaporation occurs the pump will keep the tank pumped up with water and just lower the level of the water in the sump, and it would take quite a bit of evaporation in the tank to make the sump go dry, and as long as there is about 3 inches of water in the sump, the pump should still be submerged and keeping the viewable area of the tank filled to the required level that the box needs to make it work as an overflow.

Thats just my guess though.

As for me, I've already added my rio into the backwall, so I can't have the water level go down very far before the rio would be sucking air and burn out.

Goodjob. Now just do this in black and I think you'd have a winner. I might try it today if I can find some black acrylic or even plastic and remove my extra powerhead and just replace the stock powerhead with something that can double the volume of flow.

By the way did you end up drilling holes or cutting slots? It looks like your just letting the water spill over the top of it.

 

[Ducman996]

are you talking about add a second ph in the back or just replacing the existing pump.

You are right....it would take a great deal of evaporation to run my pump dry. Yes I am just letting the water flow over the top of the skimmer. If you were to place the skimmer in the back. I don't think that it would work as well because the set up would not allow the top of the water to fall in the back. I would be doing the same thing as the stock set up. Unless you run your water level really low. Its hard to describe. Maybe it would work....i'm not too sure. Although it would look much cleaner than in the main tank.

 

[SaltyMist]

I've already got a second powerhead in the back, I cut a hole in the backwall so just the nozzle comes through, so it sucks water from the sump area.

What I might do, is to remove the second powerhead in the back and just get a larger powerhead to replace the stock powerhead. Then since it would be down at the bottom of the sump area, I could do this kind of thing on my tank.

No I wasnt meaning to put the skimmer in the sump area, that wouldnt work at all I dont think. Atleast not how I can imagine it working.

I think if you do it in black, then it will blend in pretty well with the back of the tank and not stickout quite as much and probably look like it's always belonged there. Maybe JBJ should take a clue on this thread, this seems like an easy solution to getting the surface water skimmed into the filter area.

When you siliconed it to the backwall, did you have to drain the water in the tank far enough down to silicone it onto the back wall, or do you just apply silicone to the new skimmer and stick it on?

What glue did you use to hold the box together? Did it take a certain amount of cure time before it was ready to be used?

Thanks,

 

[Ducman996]

What i did was plan on doing a water change at the same time as I installed the overflow. I let it dry for like an hour and a half. As for the assembly i used some epoxy, and because of work it was like month before i installed it.

Actually I looked for black acrylic....but I couldn't find any. although the scraps that I got a Home Depot were free. :lol:

 

[Anonymous]

Yikes, I wouldn't suggest siliconing this on if your tank is already filled. Yours may be all right now but silicone should cure for at least 24 hours before adding water, if not 48.

If you need to add this on to an existing tank, I suggest using two part epoxy used to mount frags, or using nylon screws to secure it. The epoxy cures underwater and is completely safe. You may have noticed that as long as the water flow is pretty strong, you really don't need it to be attached at all. The difference in water height presses the acrylic against the back wall, but it will then fall off if the power goes out or whatever.

 

[Anonymous]

Ok, I'm really confused. Can you explain again why you don't have problems with the thing running dry? For example, on my 30g I have an AquaC Remora HOB skimmer ... I also bought the surface skimmer box to attach to it. Basically the same thing you whipped up. This aquarium is open top, so I do get quite a bit of evaporation daily. I lose between .5 and 1 gallon ... for real! It's nuts. Anyhow, that means I have to be really diligent on water changes and top offs. If I miss the top off by more than a few hours, the water line has sunk to just about below the viable part of the toothed edge of the suface skimmer box and my pump is running dry.

 

[SaltyMist]

I think you are evaporating more than I am then, because on our hottest day so far, and I dont imagine it got more than say 82f in the house, I only lost at most a 1/8 of a gallon.

You would have to run it really low to have this problem on this setup.

What I would suggest for Duckman996 to try, is to start syphoning out water, while keeping track of how much he has syphoned out (I use a 3 gallon plastic bucket, that has lines inside of it for each gallon), and see just how much water it takes before the stock pump is sucking air. I'd be willing to bet that it's probably close to 3/4 to 1.2 gallons before the sump gets low enough to cause a problem.

And I'd like to know how much as well as a curiosity.

So far I havnt had any really hot days where the house got above 82f, so my evaporation on the nanocube was almost negligble, mayve an 1/8th of a gallon at the very most (and that was running with the cpu fan on while I was at work - the other nano didnt have the fan, and it didnt lose any evaporation to speak of).

The way these cubes work is that the sump will lower before the tank lowers if you block off the intake which is really whats going on here in it's basics, because he's made it need to raise the waterlevel in the tank to get over the overflow, so the sump lowers to raise the tank level.

The amount of evap that would need to take place is the 3/4 of the amount of water in the sump area before it couldnt pump back up anymore water into the tank to overflow the skimmer that he built.

Hope I made that clearer.

 

[nanocat]

I have two nanocubes, and neither one of them evaps more than 8 oz. a week (not per day), in an unairconditioned apartment. It was recently 92 degrees here...still no evap to speak of. I don't think evap in a nanocube is going to be much of an issue.