Okay, after reading a couple other forums, somone said that they got better performance out of their seaclone 100 skimmer by removing the prefilter sponge, so I did this.
I dont know if it was a placebo effect or not, but I seem to have noticed more skimmate.
And .......
A while back (maybe two weeks or so) I had a powerhead right next to the
air intake tube to the seaclone 100, and I noticed some white colored stuff in the airline tube. I assumed it was heat buildup and condensation in the tube and ignored it. i moved the powerhead out of the tank, and never bothered to look again.
But....
Today there is no powerhead near the airline tube and yet it had this strange white build up inside of it. So I finally broke down and pulled the airline tube and strainer from the seaclone and blew it out. Turned out somehow some
mysis shrimp had gotten into the airline tube (strange, since I think that the powerhead pulls in the water and air, and thus wouldnt sent any uneaten food "up" the airline tube), so I cleared it out, and turned off the makijet 1200 while doing so.
I reinstalled the prefilter sponge and turned it back on without any air going into it.
Man, you should have seen the amount of uneaten food that then got circulate throughout the tank. Apparently this things been sucking up uneaten food for the past month and it sits in the bottom chamber of the seaclone 100 skimmer, and just keeps going round and roung. By removing the air to it, it forced the uneaten food back into the tank, thus polluting my tank.
So.....
Regardless of what I may have previously written about not using the prefilter sponge on the seaclone 100, I NOW know better and think you should use the prefilter sponge and clean it out in the weekly water change.
Just some small advise for those rare few that still use the seaclone line of skimmer.
As an added note, I've heard that the seaclones are not good, but I can say that today while cleaning my cup out, it held the nastiest, foulest smelling skimmate I have ever experienced, and I just emptied it about 4 days ago and it had about 1/2 cup of nasty skimmate in it.
