Ok experts, here's one for you.

[meiamcool]

I am running a Skilter 250. It barely skims anything at all (most of the time nothing) and I took the filter bag out last night while I was cleaning the filter and decided to leave it out. All it was doing was trapping rotting food and such. The question I have is: Since it isn't skimming hardly at all and I'm not running the bag do you think it'd work to my advantage to take the skimmer guts out and turn the **** thing into a refugium? I have a powerhead also in the tank for water flow. The Skilter flows 250gph and the powerhead flows up to 106gph (which is what I have it on now). It was just a little idea that Whitten came up with and I thought it sounded neat. I could get a small light for it and move one of my small peices of LR in there with some sand from my spare tank to seed it a little. Let me know what you guys think. I thought this would make a nice, cheap little DIY for us Nano folk. I could be wrong though.

[Jeremy1973]

I have a Skilter 250. For it to work best, you need to modify it. What I did was, on the lid, right above the tube (where the skimmate comes out of in to the collection tray) melt a small whole in it. Big enough for an airline tubing to go through. Then, run a piece of airline tubing through there, then attach a corallife wood airstone. drop this in so it hits the bottom. Then run the other end of the tubing to an air pump. This creates the perfect little bubbles for skimming. I did this, and my skimmer ran like a champ. You may want to put on a twist valve on it, so you can regulate how much air goes in. Let me know if this helps.

[ckreef]

Whitten's idea will work fine but seems like a waste of a skilter.

I have used a skilter in the past and found that I had to do the exact modification that Jeremy suggested to get it to work like I thought it should. Maybe add the wood air-stone and give that a try. It won't cost much and if you still don't like the results you can always go for Whitten's suggestion.