Hi, just want to share my experience with my newly acquired Turboflotor 1000 skimmer. I bought this used skimmer on Ebay almost 3 weeks ago. It was to replace the Prism skimmer and was part of an attempt to control an algae outbreak in my tank.
The skimmer was in A1 condition and come with a RIO 2100 pump with the needle wheel (I Know, I know!!!).
I cleaned the skimmer and installed it in a sub-sump beside my sump/refugium. I installed the plumbing, the flow switches to control the water in and out and connected the skimmer input to the sump/refugium return line
Everything was fine, even perfect! I never seen something skim that much.. Then I read on wetwebmedia.com that this skimmer could perform better with the addition of an air pump. So I did and it did doubled the number of bubbles and obviously increased the efficiency of the skimmer.
But then, the noise of the skimmer pump and the air pump bugged me so I am planning to buy an Ocean Runner pump as soon as I find a Canadian vendor... but in the mean time yesterday night I was contemplating the skimmer and the skimmate it produced and remembered those horor stories with the RIO's pumps that people told on RC. I panic and remembered also that some people put a Mag 7 on those skimmer to replace the RIO 2100. Luckily I had 2 mag 7 doing nothing in the garage so... I decided to put the mag on the Turboflotor just to see how the skimmer would perform with that pump and what difference a normal impellor would do. It took me 30 minutes and was very easy to do. I reuse the RIO connectors parts and one additional fitting (a trimmed 3/4" to 1/2" fitting) to connect the elbow to the mag 7.
I connected the Pump to the Skimmer and put the skimmer in the sub-sump, plugged the pump and it was amazing!!! I had to remove the flow controls in order to prevent the skimmer from overflowing! The air input line is even making noise and will need a muffler. Also the quantity of bubbles is nowhere near what it was even with the air pump!!! The normal impeller did seem to be producing the same quality of bubbles than the needles wheel one but 5 times more!. The Mag 7 is noisy and will be replaced by an Ocean runner which should give the same result as the Mag7 with lesser noise/vibration.
Just wanted to share, feels good to have a real skimmer now!
