Rio Nano Skimmer

[JSTR]

Well nano keepers out there. There is a solution for skimming your under 20 gal tanks without spending $60+++ on a skimmer.

Enter the Rio Nano Skimmer. Interesting design, think of an aquaclear200 filter with and plastic rod in the intake tube. Needle wheel impeller and adjustable water intake, air intake and water outlet. Throw in a small carbon filter to polish the water and for $30CAD you have yourself a great little skimmer for your nano.

Bought one of these unit at Gold's aquarium in Calgary, on Saturday and after bringing it home, giving it a good scrubbing, set the nano up on the 8gal aquagiant cube.

Within 12 hours the skimmer was starting to produce bubbles that climb the neck on the chamber. A little bit of fine tuning and tonight after 36 hours running the skimmer is producing a light tea color wet skimmate. Little more tunning (ok honestly - just screwing around trying to figure out what works best on this unit ) and the bubbles are fairly consistentand a darker skimmate is starting to collect. Will check again tomorrow night to confirm I got the dark, dry skimmate I like to pull rom my tanks. No microbubbles from the skimmer into the tank, rare from a HOB type skimmer.

There are a few quirks to this skimmer. Like first off, you pull it from the box and notice a light oily film over the inlet tubes and collection cup. Easily fixed by a good scrubbing prior to setup. Getting use to the tunning has a learning curve but not as steep as the coralife super skimmers. Actually its really simple once yo get the hang of which adjustment has what effect. Second the needle wheel impeller is fairly noisy. I read this can be fixed but super glueing the impeller to the magnet shaft, but haven't done this yet (figure I will wait for the first scheduled cleaning to do this). AndyL may chime in here as he did the impeller mod. Last getting the right amount of water to bubbles to get the crap climbing the collection tube wall is annoying but once you get it set, you can pretty much ignore it.

Now AndyL, was having issues with the inlet tube losing water pressure. I have not had this problem, so its not all units. Mind you AndyL is known for being able to burn water, so its no suprise he found issues where most will not.

Side note the unit comes with a large collection cup, figure a little larger than the Remora Aqua C collection cup. This should help keep the water in the tank and not overflowed or flooded onto the floor, desk, counter, etc....

Quick summary: HELL of a bang for the buck.
You will not get better skimming or your nanos for less money than these little units. Added bonus can be used as a plain filter aswell. If you are looking for a cheap skimmer for your nano here it is. Prices should be around $30CAD.