Innovative Marine Protein Skimmer

SloppyJ · Sep 30, 2012

Has anyone had any hands on experience with these? They are near brand new. I emailed the company when I set my tank up in July to see what their plans were and they said late Sept they would release one. Well, I FINALLY found it for sale on marinedept. after weeks of searching. I snagged one up really fast. I run a IM 30gal tank and my main tank. I have another nano frag tank as well at my office. It should be in something this coming week and I will take pics and post a review. I've never ran a simmer before, I'm a nano guy, so I'm really kind of nervous. But from what I've read/seen it seems to be a good one. There just hasn't been a "real" skimmer to suit my needs up until now. I got the bigger 60gal version by the way.

Just thought some of the nano guys might appreciate the thread. I know I'm new to R2R but I'm not new to the hobby. :nerd:

NanaReefer · Oct 1, 2012

Nice to know as ill soon be upgrading to a 40b. Gonna subscribe. I was actually looking at the Reef Octopus BH-1000 but then I spotted the one your looking at

MarineDepot · Oct 2, 2012

From the test one of my associates ran with it, this skimmer looks real promising. Looking forward to reading a hobbyist's review.

Chris

Blindf8th · Oct 6, 2012

Hi SloppyJ,

I recently started to get back into the hobby last month. My tank choice was the Nuvo 38G. I've never had a salt setup without a sump and full-size skimmer before, so this was a leap of faith in some ways for me. When I purchased the tank, I also purchased the Innovative Marine skimmer (the larger version more suited to the 38G tank). It was still on back-order, having not been released to the public just yet. UPS arrived about a week ago, so the new skimmer has been setup for 6 days so far.

My initial impressions out of the box;
1) outstanding design
2) excellent build quality
3) no built-in skim-mate cup overflow outlet (a bit of a pain in the ****, because now the pet sitter will need to empty it daily when I'm out of town on business)
4) extremely easy to install in the Nuvo 38 tank

My initial impression while operating the new skimmer
1) the air silencer does its job very well
2) the air inlet control system has almost no effect on bubble size or production (this might be a break-in type of issue; time will tell)
3) the water level control is amazingly easy to adjust and maintains outstanding level accuracy even while the tank is being fed (amazing!)
4) the break-in period for producing good skim-mate seems to be 4-5 days (I gave it a vinegar bath for 2 hours prior to setting up in the tank)

Overall impression?
I'm 'very' impressed with this new skimmer from Innovative Marine, and would highly recommend it to those with a Nuvo tank. After the first week, I'm getting very dark skim-mate tea with both large and small particulates. To those setting one up for the first time, my advice would be to let it run for 3 days prior to raising the bubbles and producing skim-mate. The bubble level was very difficult to 'tune' during the first 3 days, which led to a couple of 'overfill' issues on my setup.

SloppyJ · Oct 11, 2012

I totally agree. It seems to be a great product so far. I've loved everything I've gotten from IM. I had an issue with the silicone on the back wall of my 30g and it failed on two different tanks. I finally epoxy'd the 3rd tank to be sure. My LFS owner talked to them at MACNA and they acknowledged the issue and said they had a new design to fix the problem.

The skimmer has been up and running for exactly one week. Like I said before since I have a nano I have no experience with a "real" skimmer designed like this one. Setup was super easy and I put it in the back right overflow chamber. If you look at the "drip loop" picture it shows it installed in the chamber next to the right hand side overflow. So that was confusing.

Adjusting the water level has been my only issue like you mentioned. I set it up with the bubbles right under the cup barely coming into the cup's intake tube. I woke up the next morning to a light green column of water about 1" deep in the cup. I've been trying to dial it in ever since. One time I went too high and when I went to bed I could hear something weird from the living room. The cup was overflowing and going crazy.

Since then I have lowered the water column with the intake pipe and left the adjustment knob as loose as it can go to hopefully induce more bubbles.

Maybe y'all can explain this to me but what changes to make it produce a skimmate? Like I can set the water to not come up into the collection cup intake pipe and wake up to find some water in the cup but the bubbles are still below the collection cup. That is perplexing me.

SloppyJ · Oct 13, 2012

Here is a pic for anyone interested. It finally broke this started happening on Thursday night and it has collected this since then. That was exactly one week after It came in.