i give....

Ok, it hasn't been addressed yet... How much and what are you feeding this fish?
To me it sounds like overfeeding

 

that particular skimmer has a filter chamber. i would add whatever kind of filtration your lacking there. if your good on biological, mechanical and chemical, i would just toss in some live rock rubble.

~Will.

 

It has been my experience that putting anything in the filter chamber can cause it to get clogged and over flow on the floor. I would leave the chamber empty and just let the skimmer part to its job. ;D

 

i think someone hit it on the nose about over feeding...i think we are going to cut down feeding maybe every other day or every 3 days...

can we put some of that blue filter to cut and fit the piece to the chamber?

with a little bag of carbon and ammonia reducer in there?

someone told me that the emperor was a good filter but causes nitrate problem in the water due possibly to the bio wheels...true or not? anyway i my skimmer will be here wednesday and off with my emperor 400..

hope this helps my situation...

thanks
Wade

 

so nothing in filter chamber and this will be all i need no other filtering device...???

what about doin a large water change on my 36 gallon tank..?????

 

I'm not sure exactly what information you are looking for here.

The skimmer will remove organic waste from your system. You can also use a mechanical filter like you are using now. Although this is not needed after the skimmer breaks in.

Protein skimmer is much more effective than the emperor type filter. Actually you cant really compare those two since the way they function is completely different in principle.

When feeding, always use the type of food that sinks. I'm assuming that you have sufficient water movement in your tank. In your case you should have somewhere around 1500gph. Turn your emperor 400 off while feeding so that the food doesnt get sucked into the filter.

One bad thing about those emperor type filters is that, whatever gets trapped in there, it starts decomposing. This can cause nitrate problems, so the filter would have to be changed frequently.

You will not have these problems with a skimmer. With the excess nutrients removed, you should see a reduction in nitrates aswell as phosphates assuming that you are using RO/DI water.

 

Yup, and no skimmer to take out the waste created from any feeding at all. Skimmer will help quite a bit. And unless you have fish that are demanding of food, feeding is best kept to twice or three times weekly (IMHO of course.....)