carbon in filter makes the water cleaner?

Don't use carbon unless your removing meds from your tank. I would keep the bio foam in the bottoms trays and fill the rest with biomax. The carbon is only good for about a month.

Carbon will definitely make your water sparkle. But there is no need for it unless you are removing meds, or want your water to sparkle. It gets expensive to replace something that is not necessary 99.999999% of the time.

once the carbon is maxed out, it leeches the pollutants back into your tank water.

Carbon is excellent at removing things from the water, but unfortunately it isn't very selective as to what it removes. Pretty much everything including trace elements and a fair amount of 02 if overused. Plenty of links to HTH with larger fish and carbon use and inferior types will leech things back into the aquarium

Purigen is a much better alternative to carbon. Pretty much lasts forever as its rechargeable and has negligible impact on trace elements. Add this or some micro filtration pads somewhere in your system and you shouldn't need the carbon to keep clear water.

I agree with the guys that say you do not need carbon in your tank. because if you do not change It like every six weeks it does the opposite of what you want.

petspoiler said:

once the carbon is maxed out, it leeches the pollutants back into your tank water.

Click to expand...

That is not completely true.

When carbon is maxed out it leeches the pollutants howevever as it leeches some of them, such pollutants leave space to be occupied back, then carbon gets able to grab those pollutans again producing then a "dynamic balance" in which the substances carbor leeches are grabbed back and this goes on and on, carbon does not lose its properies only gets maxed out but never leeches all the pollutants due t this "dunamic balance".

I hope i have made myself clear enough.


Cheers.

If you do use carbon, I find it best to use with an HOB because you can actually replace it when you need to. Breaking open a canister is not something I personally would want to do every month or so.