Functioning
The skimmer really works hard. It foeamed almost immediately. The foam, thanks to the configuration we’ve adopted, fills the body completely, starting at some centimeters from the bottom. The foam is thick and the bubbles are very thin, as you can see in the following picture. Probably it will be even more evident in the video. Visively speaking, the skimming and the color seem perfect.
The suggested level in sump is between 18 and 22 cm, suits perfectly the average of 20 cm that we always suggest. In our case (and all our measurements take account of this data), we had the bulkhead at 21 cm of height, so the skimmer works with an hydraulic head of 21,4 cm, more or less. UltraReef says that this height guarantees the perfect balance between the water pressure and the sucking of the air. Obviously (we repeat this for the ones that don’t know) they’re in balance because the skimmer has been built this way. Another deatil we would like to underline is that the skimming strongly depends on the salinity of the water: the higher the salinity, the better the performance of the skimmer. We’ve always kept 35 per one thousand.
After five months of continuous use and a slowdown due to the Corona virus, Jonathan can affirm he’s positively impressed by the skimmer UltraReef Typhoon UKD 200. Now we’ll see what we have measured and then we’ll see his personal comment.
Performances and measurements
Ultra Reef declares that his skimmer has a rate of treated water of 2.300 l/h and a rate of treated air of 1.400 l/h. Then the relationship air/water is 0,6. These numbers can change based on a lot of different variables, among which the height of water in sump, the height of the water column inside the cylinder and the salinity in particular.
Water rate
The UltraReef Typhoon UKD 200 is part of the series of skimmer with bottom drain, that is the main part of the models on the market nowadays. This feature doesn’t allow us to measure the treated water directly. But even this time we found the way to overcome this problem and measured the water in the following way: we filled the container until 21 cm, as the producer said, using fresh water. Then we set the pump on the bottom, connecting the air intake as we were in action, knowing that the performances are differrent in fresh water, but the number can be useful as yardstick. So we measured:
39,7 liters per minute, that are 2.382 liters per hour of water rate. Consider that in salt water this value can be higher, but once inserted the pump in the skimmer it will be some lacks due to the shape of the skimmer itself and to the interaction of the bubbles, that in fresh water don’t matter much. The value is even higher to the one given by the builder. Chapeau. For now we keep this value that we’ll use for a comparison with other skimmers.
Air rate
For the air we used another flow meter, a professional ItalControl PSM-21, that measures from 250 to 3.000 l/h of water.
For the first time we measured the air also after the muffler, that gave us a value of 1.150 l/h of sucked air. A very stable value.
But in order to do a comparison with other skimmers, we also had to measure the sucked air connecting directly the skimmer to the pump, and we measured a little more than 1.300 l/h of air.
Antoher time, we have a top quality value. Even Ultra Reef obtained a very important result, and our personal record here on DaniReef.
The relationship air/water is 1320/2382=~0,55
Noise
The skimmer is very quiet. It probably depends on the mass of the skimmer and on the rubber pads. We did our three measurements, all at one meter of distance from the aquarium and from the sump. We detected the following results:
Sound pressure at 1 meter with all the tools switched off and closed doors: 44,5 dB
Sound pressure at 1 meter with the skimmer switched off and open doors: 47,0 dB
Sound pressure at 1 meter after the skimmer switched on: 47,4 dB
The difference of sound pressure measured with the skimmer on and off is 0,4 dB, practically almost 0. A very silent skimmer, even if the system was pretty noisy.
The sound level meter used for the measurement is the usual VOLTCRAFT 320, digital sound level meter IEC 651 of II type that is a very accurate tool. Given the nature of the noise to detect all the measurements have been done with the attenuation curve dBA.
Maintenance costs
The skimmer UltraReef Typhoon UKD 200 has a declared consumption of 36 watt.
We have measured the consumption, too:
We noted a consumption slightly higher then declared: 40,72 watt. That is an annual cost of 96 euro, which is 0,27 euro per kwh.
We also had the consumption of the tests we did in fresh water, and in that case the consumption was more close to the suggested one. The configuration is above.
The value of the cosfi, or power factor, is great, with 0,90. This means that even the pump will exchange less heat with the aquarium.
The article continues on page three with the video, our conclusions and Jonathan’s comment.
