So anyways, this weekend I made a big purchase that I’ve been putting off for a while now, in that I bought a new filter for my fish tank. It’s needed something new for a while – I only have a total of three fish in it, but they’re huge (3-4″ each, plus a plecostomus that’s nearly a foot long!) and thus they all poop like crazy!!! Trying to clean out the filter is a fool’s errand at best and it just plugs right up again in a few weeks anyways, but lately the water’s been getting particularly cloudy and seeing as we’ll be going on vacation in a few weeks, I thought it’d be a better idea to buy a new one now than come home to a stinky fish tank for an entirely different reason…
I ended up getting a canister filter because I figured that it was about time for a change in direction entirely, and I know that I’m only about 24 hours in, but so far I absolutely love the thing. It literally went from cloudy to visible in a couple of hours, and then crystal clear by the following morning. When I got home this evening I felt like I had an entirely different tank!
Before… (I did stir the water up a little adding some, but still, gross, I know!)
About an hour later…
18 hours later! (damn…)
The thing was pretty cool to setup, albeit just a bit intimidating – I actually had to cut hoses to run into the tank and everything! The filter itself is entirely self-contained and uses three different kinds of filtration media to do its thing – foam for mechanical filtration, carbon for chemical, and then these weird ceramic things for the biological part. I’m actually thinking that it might be the ceramic things that make all of the difference because in most hang over the edge-type filters (like I was using before), you’ve got the carbon and a small amount of foam or felt to filter stuff out, which seemed to get clogged up pretty quickly. There wasn’t really anything to actually break the waste down, and thus it just piled up and got all disgusting. On the other hand, the ceramic pieces are supposed to breed bacteria to do exactly that, so we’ll see.
Regardless, I think the proof is in the pictures – it’s already made an amazing impact to the clearity of the tank (i.e. it now has some!), and now I’m just curious to see what the inside of the actual canister looks like. Admittedly I’m a little concerned about opening it up and just finding a disgusting, pressurized poop bomb waiting for me to break the seal, but maybe I’ll get lucky this time! In addition to the actual filtration, this puppy has the power to cycle through 180 gallons per hour at full tilt, meaning that it should be able to filter the entire contents of the tank more than four times an hour, which I’m sure has got to be a far cry from what that little clogged bio-wheel was doing before! Maybe between the improved filtration and now actual circulation throughout the tank, my fish will actually have a chance…
I think the best quote, though, is one that I found in a comment from a reviewer on Amazon or something: “It’s like we just upgraded to an HD fish tank.”
I don’t really speak fish, but I’m pretty sure so far mine are just loving their new 1080p home! I’m only sorry that I didn’t cough up the dough and buy one of these things years ago… 🙂