Surface Skimming

I have no traceable nitrates in my tank, and ahve been using it for 4 months.

 

My fluval is 5 years old now. Your's is still very new and not mucked up the way mine is. I have tons of pods and pineapple sponges growing in mine. Maybe I don't clean the media sponges enough, but mine spits out 10-20ppm nitrates that my anemone does not like. I'm going to harvest the pods in the canister to seed my fuge when I get it going this weekend. I would highly suggest cleaning it out weekly to keep your's from doing what mine is doing. Actually, I may keep mine in the loop to feed my macros when my fuge is running.

 

Yeah I definately do that with a tube brush

 

I ordered one myself, but found it was too big for my 5.5 gal.... I'm going to try and make it smaller somehow...

 

Yeah, make sure you clean out the sponges weekly and then rinse it with RO/DI water. Cleaning out the hoses is good practice too, since A LOT of gunk gets trapped in the ribbing and gets spat out when you turn it back on. Oh, as a side note, I put a brine shrimp net over the outlet when I first turn it on to prevent the billions of bubbles to overtake the tank.
To shorten the skimmer, you will need to cut the black tube down, the internal adjustment stick thingy, and the clear overflow skimmer. It may not work though, so take my words with a grain of salt, I assume no responsibility of any mess ups on modifying that thing.