As many things as we love to measure in our reef tanks, it’s mind boggling to me that we don’t regular measure airflow on our skimmers. It was about a decade ago that skimmers started coming with an air silencer as a standard accessory, but oddly enough airflow meters never followed suit.
An airflow meter such as the one from Aqua Medic is easy enough to construct, and incredibly hard to mess up. The airflow meter doesn’t even need to be all that accurate, as long as it can give a precise relative reading of the airdraw.
From dialing your protein skimmer for maximum performance, to knowing when to clean and service the venturi valve and air silencer, and airflow meter is an invaluable tool whose time is way overdue. It’s challenging to explain the relationship between water height and protein skimmer air draw so hopefully this video primer will be a helpful illustration of how this works.
Lower water level results in higher air draw, higher water levels reduce the air draw, but there’s definitely a good optimum water level that airflow meters can easily help reefers figure out. If you found this video helpful be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already as we’ll be dropping a lot of uncommon wisdom in our YouTube channel all summer long!
