[WorkinMan]

I got my Counter-Current skimmer assembled Thursday evening. I havn't leak tested yet and don't have it up and running yet though. I'm at my brothers place for Easter weekend, so when I get back home I will post pics and get it running Monday or Tuesday. Depends on how well my boys go to bed....... I have a 3 year old and a 9 month old, and their Navy mom is out on deployment so I'm playing Mr. Mom right now, and the only time I have to do anything without my 3 y/o "helping" me is after bed time. For anyone thinking of DIYing their own check back often for updates. If it works well, I will put a step-by-step in the DIY section.

[RyanG]

Oh this is good! Bill I need pictures!!

[WorkinMan]

Here's a pic of it fully assembled. I'm still leak testing. I think I have one so now I have to find it. Hopefully it's in a spot that can be easily fixed. Total height is about 40 inches.



I probably won't actually get it running till this weekend though so I can be home all day to get the water level right and what not.
Oh, don't mind the mess on my living room floor. It's where I did all the drilling and cutting. Why the living room? Well, mostly cause my wife isn't home to tell me not to, hehe.

[WorkinMan]

Ok, leak tests finally yielded positive results so I finally got the skimmer plumbed in Saturday night and got it running and tuned in Sunday morning. I got loads of foam once I turned on the air pumps and had to re adjust the water flow to get the foam level where it needed to be. Total tune in time was an hour and a half to 2 hours.
It seems to be working already though. When I got home from work today there was nasty brown trails down the stand pipe and yucky kinda smelly brown water in the collection cup. I drilled a hole in the bottom of the collection cup during assembly for a tube to dump the junk into a 1 gallon container and there is brown water and some small cunks of stuff in there as well.
The foam I'm getting is still white, but I have seen on here of other skimmers that sometimes you have to let them break in for a week or so before the really start producing some nice smelly dark foam.
So far so good though so for anyone following this, check back during the next couple weeks for updates. Unfortunatly I won't be able to get very good pictures. The battery died in my digital, and the digital my wife has on the ship uses the same charger. We have only one and, well, it's on an aircraft carrier that's floating around somewhere on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea. I'll see what kind of pics I can manage with my phone and if they are clear enough I'll post them up. I'll try to get on here to update the progress every couple of days. Depends on how well my boys go to bed and how I feel after they are in bed.
Keep your fingers crossed for me. Like I said, if it works well, I'll gladly share as building this was a whole heck of a lot cheaper than buying one. I can't really say how much it cost me. I kinda threw away all the recieps. I didn't spend any more than $50 though. If anyone wants to know about the cost I'll go look at prices and figure it all up.

[WorkinMan]

Hit a snag!! For some reason, if the skimmer is not kept as close to level as possible in all dirctions the water level will lower. With all my messing with it this evening, it has gotten out of level. That was the easy part to fix. The bad part is that with all my messing with it I have broken a seal where the inlet pipe goes into the reaction chamber!! I had to shut it down, dry it off and slather it with silicone. I hope this seals it up. I really don't want to have to take it completly out of the system to fix it. Grrrr. This means that tomorrow evening I am going to have to spend another hour or so to retune it. As this project progresses I am seeing things that I should have done differently so I may end up building another one. One of those things is to use a union joint in the inlet line for ease of removel. For anyone following this, learn from my mistakes! I'm sure I'll make enough of them for all of us!

[WorkinMan]

Ok, I have a few pictures that I would like to share. The first two are pictures of the collection cup after the first full day of it running.





The gallon milk jug that I have it draining into looks about the same.

[WorkinMan]

The last pic is this evening, after the second full day that the skimmer has been running (after a day of down time for fixing the leak)



To those with skimmers, does this look like a good amount of junk removed compared to a commercially manufactured skimmer? It seems to be working well, but I have never seen the amount of gunk removed from a tank via skimmer in the span of a day before so I can't really guage anything on my own experiences.

[RyanG]

Having darker or lighter skimate is just proof of the load on your tank. However my ER skimmer pulls out gobs and gobs of black skimmate out of my tank. The results you are getting seem to be good. How many fish/livestock do you have in your tank if any?

[WorkinMan]

My cycle seems to be dragging on for some reason, so I have no livestock yet. Only LR. It did kick out some nice brown foam when I baster blasted my rocks the other day to get all diatomes off them though. I am pretty sure that's what all the junk in the collection cup was as the gunk production has slowed down significantly since then. My Nitrate level is extremely high so I decided to ditch my mechinacal filtration (as I believe that was the cause) now that I have the skimmer running and rely only on the LR and skimmer for filtration to see if it helps the cycle finish up and maybe let the LR catch up with the Nitrate a little.

[NATIVEVAMAN]

How tall is that skimmer? It looks like if its flop as skimmer you will have one very interesting lamp lol.

[WorkinMan]

Sorry it's been a while. The skimmer is about 40 inches tall.

Update: Been having problems keeping a good constant foam going. When it does foam though it pushes out some chunks and some smelly skimmate so it does seem to be working, when it works anyway...