Oase Swimskim Pond Skimmer

I love Oase's SwimSkim Pond Skimmer! It works exactly like the review videos said it would. It's quiet and compact, yet powerful, easy to set-up and clean. It tackled a glut of maple flowers overnight and has kept on boosting my water clarity since I plopped it into the pond. It's so easy to empty, yet it holds a lot more debris than I imagined its small size would. Our pond has a stone waterfall and a boggy edge, with the patio coming right up to the water on the opposite side, so there really is no place to attractively install a permenent skimmer. This product has been the right solution. The pump functions as an aerator, too, which is a welcome bonus. All of this for a remarkably low price!

It is important to "KNOW" the purpose in which you are getting a skimmer, the style you are buying versus what you expect it to do. Over all this skimmer is powerful and has abundant suction power. With the filters it has and the basket filter holes it is obvious it was build to take out small to larger size debri in the water. I have a 1000 gallon home built koi pond (above ground) and before I bought a shade cloth and pressurized filter (with Ultra Violet lamp) I noticed algae bloom occurring in my pond. That is where the water starts to turn green simply because of direct sunlight into water. The shade cloth helps a lot, and the ultra violet pressurized filter helps a lot, now for the skimmer. The skimmer is originally designed to capture everything that floats on the surface. The particles of algae are smaller than the filter media on the skimmer so I modified my skimmer. Under the bottom where the skimmer pumps water and air, is a detachable directional nozzle. I removed that and added a footie nylon (short nylon sock) and secured it with a nylon wire tie. I reassembled the skimmer and placed it back in the water. Now the skimmer not only handles all the larger debri but will also assist in removing even the smaller algae that tries to build up in a pond. The footie sock fills up like a small balloon and will rise to the surface and float. After it picks up some algae it begins to appear like a small moss covered rock next to your skimmer. This is working quite well for me. I do a every 2 week maintenance by lifting skimmer out of water and washing the filter basket and changing the footie.

Update: it has lived it's life, and died. 2025. Almost 5 years of most of the year use for my koi pond (like 8 months a year?). I definitely got my use from this. This is being used in an bove ground pond, you can see how much pollen debree it's pulled in within about an hour. It has a mind of it's own on where it's going, and as you can see with my tie cord, it wasn't just going to go with the water flow but actually against it, so it's definitely pumping out boubles/water;which is good. Or bad. There's no good way for me to ancor it in the water center/away from the walls without a tie cord on multiple sides. But it's working hard on pulling in all the top debree

My pond is 24'x12' and when I plugged this skimmer in the surface had a lot of floating debris, grass and leaves and whatnot. In less than 12 hours of running this skimmer has nearly sucked in every bit of loose trash. It can be a bit tricky at first, to get it to float correctly and get it to stay in place but it didn't take too much time or effort to fine tune it. I highly recommend this skimmer if you don't want to build one into your pond, it's very convenient. Easy to move, easy to clean. Just lift it out of the water and pull the basket and filter pad out.

Nice compact unit, well designed, easy to set up. Does a good job of skimming debris WHEN it stays submerged. The collecting basket is small, but easy to empty. Even after tying two bricks to the bottom it still pops up out of the water to a point where new water cannot enter through the inner filter basket. This has meant, putting on waders every day to get out to the point where its deep enough to not ground on the pond floor, but too far away to service the basket from the shore. Would probably work well on straight sided walls versus sloped pond wall.

We bought this skimmer to go with our 1900 gph pump and filter setup for our constructed goose pond. It’s partially under a tree and we have giant geese, so lots of leaves, feathers, and other random debris floating everywhere. I kid you not, this little guy cleared the whole pond surface in one freakin’ hour. We did experience the same issues other reviews have noted about it popping up out of the water. We initially put rocks in ours, too, until I noticed the three “wings” that it floats on have holes on top to be filled like a ballast. There is a very important part of the instructions you should not ignore: completely sink the whole thing before turning it on. I would even add that you let all the little air bubbles escape from the wings before you turn it on. Since we did that-not a single problem. I would definitely recommend this little workhorse.

Doesn’t work. Keeps floating to the top. Drained the air as suggested , weighed down with rocks. Apparently there’s a fix but you have to hook up some third party valve. Fix the design!!! Returing tomorrow

My old pond was about 1400 gallons & the Oase skimmer was perfect for not only keeping the surface clear of leaves, etc., but it adds much needed oxygen to the pond! You can tether to the side or let it free-float, but either way, the pattern of bubbles pushed through the bottom of the skimmer helps move the surface of the water, allowing the skimmer to do it’s job. Building a new 8k gal. pond and temporarily moved my Koi to a small pool, which is cleaned and oxygenated by that same Oase pond skimmer! It is a workhorse! I will always keep one handy for my treatment pool when the new pond is built!💪🏼