Functioning
The skimmer needed a few days of break-in. The foam fills the body starting from the diffusion plate til the base of the glass. The foam is beautiful, but maybe the bubbles are too big. Visually the skimming seems very good.
The suggested level in sump is about 20 cm: with this level the pression of the water and the sucking of the air are perfectly in balance. Obviously (and we explicity say this because there’s someone who doesn’t know) it’s because the skimmer has been built with this features. So I suggest to be very close to 20 cm, as we did in our test.
After over 6 months and a half of use we can affirm that the Red Sea RSK600 worked perfectly. But especially with very little maintenance!
The RSK600 and the maintenance
Thanks to the internal brushes and the drain pipe, we didn’t have to do any other type of maintenance. We installed the skimmer in sump in February and we went on until summer, when we extract and completely cleaned it once back from the holidays.
Performances and Measurements
The builder declares a flow rate of 1.500 l/h and an air flow of 750 l/h. This numbers depend on variable factors, among which the height of water in sump, the height of the water column inside the cylinder and especially the salinity, that in our case has always been 35 per thousand. The relationship air/water is 0,5.
At this point we would usually showed some pictures of the inside of the glass… But we didn’t have to open it, so we don’t have any picture. We love this feature of the skimmer.
Unluckily the particular conformation of the skimmer with a low drain didn’t let us measure the treated water. While in measuring the air we used our flowmeter Sander that measured the air from a minimum of 100 l/h to a maximum of 1200 l/h, the values revealed has to be increased by 10% to consider the losses of the tool.
So we obtained a flow of treated air of 1045 l/h (950 measured + 10%), with the air completely open. The value was very stable. The incredible thing is that this value remained the same with both clean and dirt skimmer. And it’s much higher than declared, we have an increasing of the 40%. A great result.
The skimmer is very silent, we did three tests, at less then a meter from the aquarium and the sump, and we obtained the following results:
Acoustic pressure at 1 meter with all the utilities of the aquarium turned on and closed doors of cabinet: 42,8 dB
Acoustic pressure at 1 meter with the skimmer turned off and open doors of cabinet: 43,6 dB
Acoustic pressure at 1 meter after reactivating the skimmer: 45,8 dB
The difference in the acoustic pressure measured with the skimmer on and off is of 2,2 dB. Sure it is a considerable value, but little annoying.
The sound level meter is the usual VOLTCRAFT 320, digital meter IEC 651 of Type II that while measuring is sufficiently reliable. Given the nature of the noise all the measurements have been done with the attenuation curve dBA.
The article continues on page three with costs and our conclusions.
