Custom Hose Floats and Manifolds

In the oil skimmer / oil separator business we use a lot of custom industrial hose and different hose assemblies, which often requires custom flotation to keep from sinking or weighing down the wrong side of a floating skimmer or any type of distribution manifold. Any skimmer system or setup that does use hoses or floating pipe —is not complete until you have enough flotation to keep it all afloat and at the right attitude.

In addition to our standard hose & pipe floats, we can fabricate custom strap on flotation cells for odd shaped piping, hoses and configurations. The custom flotation is just that-give us your weights and some kind of simple drawing or pics of what you have / need to get floated.

Pics below show a custom manifold, hooking up 3 of our FWS00A381 skimmers & hoses to a custom 8” manifold with 8” camlock coupler quick connects. This whole affair bolted up to the flange coupling on a 10” floating suction pipe hooked to a 10” pump on shore. This particular setup is being used on an ash pond decanting / dewatering / surface skimmer system in power plants finally have to deal with the ash. Using our adjustable strap system we can attach flotation to almost anything on the water.

Hose Floats:

We’ve been doing this for over 20 years and due to never being able to find good quality inexpensive hose floats, we started having ours made custom for us to our spec. These “TuffStuff” hose floats made with a urethane “sandwich or layering” process that incorporates a damage resistant outer skin or shell and VERY light high flotation closed cell inner foam section. Floats till destruction.

Split in half lengthwise, the sections are joined around the hose with QuickSnap, gear type industrial stainless hose clamps. All you need is a screwdriver to tighten the clamps and / or large cable ties are also available for more permanent installations.

Complete Skimmer System, with diesel diaphragm pump

Complete Skimmer System, with diesel diaphragm pump

Unlike the very expensive hollow extruded hose floats, these hose floats will maintain full flotation capability even though damaged almost to destruction. These “TuffStuFF hose floats are available for hose from 1.5” all the way to 8”. See the chart below for your flotation needs.

Hose SIze

1.5" Standard

2" Standard

2.5" Standard

3" Standard

3" Heavy Duty

4" Standard

4" Heavy Duty

6" Standard

6" Heavy Duty

Cable Float

Inner Diam.

1-11/16"

2-3/16"

2-3/4"

3-1/4"

3-5/8"

4-1/4"

4-3/4"

6-1/4"

6-3/4"

1-1/8"

Outer Diam.

6"

7"

8"

10"

13"

8"

Length

8"

10"

12"

FLoating Capacity*

6.3#

5.9#

10.4#

9.3#

16.1#

13.3#

23.0#

18.0#

37.6#

19.2#

Custom Hose Floats and Manifolds

(314) 579-9755

For some process application and certainly within the petro industry, urethane foams may not hold up to the water/oil chemistry. For these instances we simply manufacture our hose floats out of stainless or even more exotic alloys. These welded hose floats and back floats can be furnished with one way vents for high temp application. These are “well engineered” accessory items for many skimmer applications.

All closed tank skimmer applications require these custom welded metal floats. For closed tank skimmer applications we prefer the use of our articulated swing arm pipe assemblies that allow the skimmer to follow the liquid levels.