To all Skimmer and Bubble King owners

[midgetwaiter]

Skimmin and I have been talking about this subject pretty steadily for a week or so. He is unable to convince me that a Bubble King is a reasonable purchase and I am unable to convince him that it isn't. Here's my side of the argument:

The thing that I am stuck on is that I don't think these units are going to skim a whole lot better than something at a fraction of the price. There was an article published a while ago that supports this.

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2009/1/aafeature2

The comparisons they did with 4 different skimmers based on different air injection styles showed that they all did about the same job with a protein analog in roughly the same amount of time. Unfortunately they didn't have one of the newer high end skimmer designs included in the testing so it doesn't seem to be a good supporting argument for this discussion. However if you take a good look at the article (and it's a beast I know) two things jump out at me that I think are very relevant.

In the controlled testing 3 of these older designs were able to achieve recovery rates greater than 90% when tuned properly. In fact it was the airstone model that managed the most consistently high recovery, which I am not surprised by at all.

Additionally when tested with real world tank water they all had similar results. The really interesting thing here is what the ceiling of those results are. The thing we want our skimmer to do for us is remove dissolved organics which we can measure as Total Organic Carbon. None of these skimmer was able to remove greater than 30% of the TOC measured. Because of the way a skimmer works a dissolved compound needs to have a structure that sticks to the bubbles or it won't be removed. Apparently 70%-80% of the dissolved organic compounds in your reef tank don't have the right structure and as such no skimmer can remove them.

So if I am able to get 100% recovery of available organics out of say a $500 ETSS Downdraft and realistically that is only 30% of the TOC in my tank anyway what am I paying 3x the price for exactly?

I can see three reasons to go spend a wack of dough on a fancy bit of aquarium gear.

1) It's going to work perform better than what I have. That doesn't seem to be possible in this case but I'd like to hear other people's points of view.

2) It's going to be easier to setup / maintain / tune. This is potentially important, it doesn't matter what a unit is capable of if it isn't setup right. However in the hands of an experienced reef keeper I don't think most skimmers are that big of a hassle and Skimmin is a pretty good DIY skimmer guy.

3) It's shiny. The BKs have a lot of shiny appeal to them.

So it seems to be that the only category BK (and other high price tag designs) wins in is the shiny factor. That's fine if that's the reason he wants to get it but he seems to think it's going to work better and I don't agree.