Man, every time I get to overthinking something I always get into trouble!. Between last night and this morning I've been dwelling on this so much I can't even find the posts that got me to thinking in the first place. Now, my water peramaters are fine so my filtration must be adequate I would think but by what I've been reading here it seems to me my sumps are too small. Somewhere I read that we need 30% of the tanks size for the wet dry filter, 50% for the sump. So. with my 300 gal tank I should be using 90 gallons of bio balls in the tower and that tower should be in a 150 gallon sump??. that seems huge. As it sits now, I've got two 20 gallon wet/drys that only have towers measuring 9.5" x 10" x 12". I can't get much more than 5 gallons running thru the sumps, so when we say 150 gallon sump should I have a 150 gallon tank down there or should I have 150 gallons of water down there?. And now that I think about it, 90 gallons is 18 sparkletts bottles so I'm thinking I missed something . Well, anyway thanks for putting up with me! jim.
wet/dry filter capacities
- Thread starter jamesgang
- Start date
From my understanding, the sump should be 1/4 to 1/3 the size of your tank. So, for a 300g tank, your sump should be in the range between a 75g to 100g tank.
That's the general rule of thumb. moderate to heavy bio-load.
How long has your tank been up & running?
If your parameters/chemistry is right (not wavering month to month) (verified from 2 sources (your test set and a trusted LFS)) and you don't plan to increase the bio-load, I wouldn't touch a thing. Tanks with a light bio-load don't need near the amount of filtration the over-stocked ones do.
Dr Joe
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How long has your tank been up & running?
If your parameters/chemistry is right (not wavering month to month) (verified from 2 sources (your test set and a trusted LFS)) and you don't plan to increase the bio-load, I wouldn't touch a thing. Tanks with a light bio-load don't need near the amount of filtration the over-stocked ones do.
Dr Joe
.
The tank has been up for close to 2 years, but about 6 or 8 months back I removed my three 10" oscars leaving just the 2 peacock bass and a footlong common pleco who as a matter of fact just died on me a month back so now I've just got the two 7" bass and a new 4" pleco. After I got rid of the other fish I did however remove my eheim 2217 cannister and fluval 403 cannister cause it seemed like a bit much, not that I've ever felt that you could actually over filter a tank. It just seemed that with a few less fish and the fact that the current in the tank was aproaching "undertow" levels I could lessen my filtration a bit.
I had a 300 with a 55g tank as a sump. It had 20g of pot scrubbies which is way over what is recommended. It worked out great. From what I've read 2.2g of bioballs should be sufficient for 100g of water. I opted to go with pot scurbbers because they have a higher surface area, so you could (in theory) get away with even less.
Right on, thanks for all the input!, I think I may play around with my media a bit, I was thinking that I might be a bit underfiltered but those 2 wet/dry setups were about $25 less than the bloody tank itself so getting my monies worth out of em was up there on my priorities list. Thanks again for all your insight, jim.
