Hey Chad,
Being new to reefing, I can't tell you exactly what is happening or what to do about your skimmer. I can however let you know about VERY similar situations and things I did on my tank.
I have one of those Lee's air driven skimmers on my 20 gallon. It is very finicky about settings and tuning. Every time I change the water perameters of my tank,(water change, top off, dosing, fragging ect.) I must adjust the skimmer. The two main non skimming conditions I get are no skimming with little foam and none rising up the tube or exactly what you described, what I call "blowing over".
I have noticed that carbon or the reef additive I use, affects the ph for a breif period and the skimmer goes nuts like you described. The same thing happened when I fragged some softies too. My cure for the skimmer "blowing over" was to raise the skimmer in the tank thus increasing the hieght of the foam column and regular skimming occurs.
If I have the little foam and no rising, my cure is to lower the skimmer, decrease water flow and or increase air supply.
I don't know what type of skimmer you have or if you can do any of these adjustments, but if so, this should get you by until your water perameters stabalize.
I have literaly spent an entire day tweaking and playing with my skimmer and have found that water perameters are a HUGE factor in how a skimmer performs.
I hope this helped.
Ken
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