Needlewheel to Meshwheel skimmer mod

[fishface]

well, my experiment with this provided to be unfruitful and about a waste of at least an hour of my precious time. i tried a combination of christy's and bill's attempts, by that i mean i used gutterguard cause i didn't have the enkamat and i just put the layers over top of the needles cause i was paranoid and didn't want to potentially kill an impeller.

end result was that the skimmer worked fine this way but there was in no way any improvement in performance or bubble production. just one persons experience here...i guess sometimes ya just have to go for it huh?

[Delphinus]

Yeah, I think you really need to do the dirty deed of cutting off the impellers.

If it helps, I resisted this for a long time too, finally decided to go for it, and .. I don't regret it one bit. It's by far the best thing you can do to your skimmer to "make it better."

I can send you some Enkamat if you want .. I have a roll of the friggin' stuff and I've sent pieces in the mail several times now. PM me if you want to go that route..

[tang daddy]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

Yeah, I think you really need to do the dirty deed of cutting off the impellers.

If it helps, I resisted this for a long time too, finally decided to go for it, and .. I don't regret it one bit. It's by far the best thing you can do to your skimmer to "make it better."

I can send you some Enkamat if you want .. I have a roll of the friggin' stuff and I've sent pieces in the mail several times now. PM me if you want to go that route..

Tony, pls send me some enkamat if it's possible would like to see the difference between enkamat and gutterguard thx oh pls check pm.

[fishface]

so the results are in......i've just done the mod to a sedra 9000 and so far i can see that there's smaller bubbles but not anymore foam is being produced than what i was getting before. i guess time will tell with the resulting quality and amount of skimmate. we shall see...

ps. thanks again for the enkamat Tony.

[Delphinus]

Yeah, I found that I didn't reallt get "more overall air" into the skimmer but the bubbles were visibly smaller than before and I got a much better, and more consistent, skimmate production. Hope you find over a couple of days that it is better than "pre-mod".

[fishface]

well, after several days of trying this mod i have to say that overall i went back to gutterguard due to unreliable and very noisy starts. perhaps i did something wrong with the enkamat, but after going to gutterguard i seem to be getting pretty much the same results as what the impeller was before the mod. but like i mentioned, quieter and much more reliable restarts... oh well, can't say i never tried .

[fishface]

update: i wanted to try the enkemat again so i gave it a shot today and i have to say, i gotta eat my words. i remounted this stuff and trimmed the edges more and i AM getting larger amounts of and smaller bubble production. i also noted that taking the valve off of the venturi line increased bubble by perhaps 10-15% as well. thanks again Tony, glad i revisited this mod!