Old skimmer to kalk reactor.

On behalf of steve wright I am bringing you a little info on how I accomplished this diy. It began with an older PM skimmer that's ran by airstones rather than a venturi. I should have taken pictures while I was building but I just didn't think of it. I'm uploading this from my phone so I'm just going to throw it up here and then come back and edit from there in a few min.


Here is the skimmer with the collection cup attached. Its a nice skimmer, but I am already running a great octopus skimmer so I thought Why not make something of this.


I was lucky that PM makes the top to the skimmer and the neck connection the same size so it fit in perfectly.


I ran tubing to the bottom of the chamber for water entering the unit from my ato container.


I utilized the air hose connections to run water through the chamber when I have it connected to my ato.


Here you can see all of the old air connections. Two of them were not going to be used so I just connected them together for an easy seal.


The pump I am using to mix up the kalk is a hydor seltz l40. I was not using this pump for anything so I actually did not have to spend any money to put this reactor together.





Here it is showing the water flowing through it. It has a nice flow and will stir up my kalk a few times a day.



Here it is attached to my ato. If you look close you can see I have it running just for fun.




Here is the original picture of it. It was a gift from a friends parents who were moving and didnt want to take the tank out of the wall.

Please feel free to ask any questions.

Thanks.

 

Thank you for this Bama, very interesting

I have questions if you do not mind

1) how do you prevent the Kalk slurry or crust getting into the pipelines?
2) does the system work by having the ATO water enter the Kalk reactor and then enter the tank or is it the other way round, with Kalk loaded water being sent into the ATO?
3) what controls the amount / concentration of the kalk that reaches the main tank
as its linked to evaporation, do you percieve a need for additional dosing or will you be able to increase the strenght of the solution to compensate

thats 3 questions for now

good use of an otherwise redundant piece of equipment ( as you already had a decent skimmer)

Steve

 

interesting build bama.

 

1) how do you prevent the Kalk slurry or crust getting into the pipelines?
I have it run on two separate timers. It mixes four times a day for 15 minutes each. Two hours later after the mixing event the ATO will recieve power via another timer. At this time it will pull water from the center of the reactor where the good kalk water comes from.
2) does the system work by having the ATO water enter the Kalk reactor and then enter the tank or is it the other way round, with Kalk loaded water being sent into the ATO?
The water starts in the orange 5 gal bucket and then goes through the kalk reactor, on to the ATO pump and into the sump.
3) what controls the amount / concentration of the kalk that reaches the main tank
as its linked to evaporation, do you percieve a need for additional dosing or will you be able to increase the strenght of the solution to compensate
I am just going to let the evaporation allow for the amount to be dosed. I am going to experiment here and see what that solution will produce in terms of dosing capabilities.

Thanks for the inquiry.

 

Thanks for the details bama

I will be really interested with this units progress
especially in terms of its ability to maintain the parameters
and how it performs over a long period

How much kalkwasser will it hold, and how many days will it last for you

sorry about the extra questions

Steve

 

thats pretty trick bama! im interested to see a pic of how well it works... it sure looks like it will work just as good as one of those couple hundred dollar ones

Gotta love DIY

 

Love that. Great work. I will hitch along here too.
For the record Bama - if I had known you had an air-stone PM skimmer, I would have bought it from you and gravity-fed that on my tank. ;D They were probably one of the best airstone skimmers made.[STRIKE] I tried to buy one from them a couple years ago but they said they stopped making them. I used to have a couple airstone skimmers (24x6) that were gravity fed on a tank of mine back in 1992. I liked them. [/STRIKE]Sorry to get off topic - nice use of old equipment all the same!!

matt

 

Thanks for all the kind words people.

I will pick up some Kalk on my way home so we can see it in action. I will post up pictures when get it running. Then I can post up some params to see what this will help with. Keep you posted.

 

Well done!

I have a PSK100 with a crapped out pump, and since it's a couple years old I'm thinking about selling it to help buy a new SWC 160 cone.

However, I need a Ca reactor and this thread has me thinking about a DIY repurpose. It seems easy enough.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Awesome!!! I can't wait to "see" it running!! Very creative and smart. Good job!