So I got in on a few black friday bargains from an American retailer and decided to get myself a much needed christmas present.
And why, may you ask, is this a much needed item? See exhibit A below:
I work out of town for ~24+ days a month and when I'm home I typically don't have enough time to do all of the maintenance I'd like to on my reef tank. Combine this with the fact that it's a real PITA to remove my skimmer cup from my very cramped sump and you have a formula for a very gross and poorly performing skimmer.
Here are the pics of the Vectra installed on my Alpha 250 cone skimmer:
And here is the collection cup after only running for 5 days with the neck cleaner installed:
Since I've had the Vectra installed for ~3 weeks now, I can say that this was definatley a worthwhile investment. I purchased this product primarily to cut down the amount of maintenance required and didn't really expect to see that much of a difference in the performance of the skimmer. However I was pleasantly surprised by how much more skimmate I'm now getting with the Vectra in place. I'd estimate that I'm now producing 20 - 30% more skimmate per week than I was prior to installing the Vectra.
Currently I have the Vectra running at 1 minute intervals twice per day and that seems to be doing the trick although I may add in a 3rd or 4th interval as well to see if it makes any difference on skimmate production.
I did shoot a short video of the Vectra in action but since I'm on satellite internet out at work, I wasn't able to upload the video (I'll try to get it uploaded on my next shift at home).
What I wanted to illustrate with the video was how the Vectra has basically no effect on the foam head inside of the skimmer body when it's operating. I had expected the foam head to collapse similar to when I add food or work with my bare hands in the aquarium. This is not the case. Directly behind the wiper blade, larger bubbles end up forming as the blade wipes the skimmer neck clean and then seconds later they are replaced by the same small to micro sized bubbles that are more typical of a needlwheel driven skimmer.
As with every Vertex product I've ever owned, build quality on this unit screams qualilty. Packaging was very modern and effective at protecting the unit from damage while in transit. My only complaint with this unit is that it does not have an integrated timer and I had to go out and drop another $15 on a digital timer in order to get this unit up and running. This is a very common complaint on this unit and the folks over at Vertex say they left out an integrated timer purposely so that hobbyists could integrate the Vectra more easily with their reef controllers.
I personally do not own a reef controller and even if I did, I'd rather this unit have its own integrated timer anyway so that I wouldn't have to waste one of the precious few outlets on the power bars for the Vectra.
Either way, this is the only shortcoming that the Vectra has IMO and this seems very minor in comparison to the solid build quality and benefits of running the Vectra.