The Unkai Skimmer from PRS Japan is one of the most complex and sophisticated protein skimmers ever designed. It’s got an open volute design for its internally mounted, controllable DC pump, a custom 3D printed gridwheel impeller, adjustable height, adjustable venturi intake, adjustable water inlet, extendable neck and even an optional helical neck cleaner.
But what if you just wanted to get the heart of this incredible protein skimmer system, that DC pump with sweet 3D printed gridwheel goodness? Well if you don’t want to get all OCD with every aspect of protein skimmer performance, the Unkai Lite is a new model which boils this protein skimmer down to its essentials.
First of all, the Unkai Lite is actually a concept skimmer used to demonstrate how the Unkai DC pump (and futuristic gridwheel) can perform when installed outside the skimmer body on popular existing protein skimmer models. In their demo video you can see that the Unkai Lite skimmer has an incredibly non-turbulent bubble environment in the body with an air-water interface which is virtually flat!
This lack of turbulence is most likely due to how the gridwheel chops up the air into teeny tiny and incredibly uniform bubbles, something which we saw in the ATI PowerCone which also has (had) a gridwheel impeller. The Unkai skimmer itself is still some months off from being available from PRS Japan but hopefully they will have less of a bottleneck producing the custom DC pump for it, and a whole crop of mid-size protein skimmer will be able to enjoy a similar level of super fine foam and the reduced turbulence it creates.
[PRS Japan]
