help moding a g3 skimmer

Gate valve mod is very simple I'm pretty sure peterson plumbing or any other plumbing store should have gate valves, just make a T with the gate valve pointing down and an open pipe going up, you can use your same down pipe now.

Now for the recirc you'll need uniseals, I always get mine from savko.com, doubt anyone in town carries them.  It's very simple you use your same elbow output and venturi input, just rotate the pump and mark a hole where the venturi lines up, drill your hole, put in your uniseal and push the venturi into the hole, make sure to already have the airline attached or its a PITA to get on.

Meshmod- guess this should come before the recirc, take your stock impeller and snip off the pins with pliers or use a dremel, now drill a couple more holes and cut your mesh, three layers should work well, attach with fishing line or zipties through the holes that were already there/ you made.  Fishing line gives better performance and less drag.

I would start off with first doing the meshmod, if you have mesh you don't need anything else, then do the gate valve mod ( no performance gain but easier to adjust)

If after that you still want to do the recirc mod go for it.   You;ll need to add a feed for the water your skimmer is processing so you'll need another uniseal and drill a hole preferably about 2/3 the way up and feed from your overflow (ideal) or from another feed pump.  You may find you're happy with the performance as it is after those two upgrades.

If you want some ideas on how to drastically improve your venturi performance I can help with that too.



Edited by dew2loud1 - December 22 2008 at 9:52pm

what dion did is much easier

I have a hard time believing  a seaclone is worth any thing besides a conversation piece. I went through the whole "modify a seaclone to the nuts" and still had a pos.

Edited by Dion Richins - December 22 2008 at 9:59pm

Yes and gate.

Dion, There is noway I'd mess with seaclones they are such a piece of crap, of course I was suckered into buying one as my first skimmer as well..... There are a lot of marginal skimmers that can be improved, but most of them aren't worth the acrylic their made of.

Well if you recirc it then its a little different you can get away with merely adding in a 3/8" airline before the volute.  If you want it ran normally, I recently made one modeled off of the LFP venturi on reefcentral, (the guy who designed it is a fluid dynamics engineer).  It's working very well on my GEO skimmer, it runs a sedra 9000 so similar to your's.

John is yours a sedra 5000?

That pump benefits a ton from the mesh mod,
A couple other things you can do is port out the output with a dremel, if you look inside the output you'll see that its threaded, and ASM glued a larger adapter on top of that which is what your elbow slides onto, those threads cause a lot of restriction.
You can also, when the cover is off look inside the volute and port it out, where it goes to the discharge, I'll try to find some links.
Basically they take pumps that are flow biased and try to make them skimmer pumps, skimmer pumps benefit from no restrictions, so anyway you can improve that makes a big difference.

here you go video and all on the meshmod, crystal actually meshmodded our first pump on her own off of this clip. 
http://www.talkingreef.com/forums/podcast-episodes/3641-euroreef-mod-podcast-epiode-91-a.html