Under filtration

ammonia, if you never have ammonia(and eventual nitrites) you are cycled...a cycled tank has" enough" filtration...now if your fish grow , or you add fish, all bets are off ,everything then is subject to change

Only way to find out is to invest in. Good test kit. Each time you add a fish, test if your filter is handling the bio-load. Likewise, as the fish gets bigger, again test for water parameters.

Jag586 said:

I know you can pretty much never over filtrate a tank but what are signs or how do you tell if your filtration is enough? Mechanical is easy if water is clear it's good. Right? But biological to me is a little harder to tell so what are ways to tell, ammonia nitrates nitrites? Or is there something more like how fast they climb?


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If you are new to biological filtration, try purchasing a canister filter............I have been using fluval and rena canister filters for awhile now.....ONly recently have I been building my own filters...............WET/DRY filters are the ultimate in filtration............They are also fun.............I can grow bamboo in their holding tanks................Growing plants and having crustaceans living in with the plants increases the chemical/biological filtering of the water............

The only way to tell if you're underfiltered is if you have ammonia and nitrite readings, if both of those are 0 then you have enough filtration.

Think of it this way. Your tank (its occupants, how much you feed, etc.) produces a certain amount of waste. If you have enough biological filtration, you are cycled. You could have, just to illustrate the point, 1000 pounds of Matrix and a single goldfish, but the bacteria needed to process that goldfish's waste would be exactly the right amount regardless of the amount of media or flow...because your would only be feeding that population. If you were to added another goldfish to the system the amount of waste (bacteria food) would go up and the bacterial population would too, and would have no trouble keeping up with this modest increase in food supply. Adding 100 goldfish, though, would mean that despite how much surface area (the Matrix) they have, and the sudden abundance of food (ammonia and then nitrite), the bacterial population would not have enough time to grow to keep levels at zero. They would get there eventually but in the meantime that bad stuff would accumulate and kill your fish.

But to get to your question, I guess, more directly, under filtration would be where the bacteria do not have a place or the flow to process the waste, no matter how much time and food/waste you give them. So, a goldfish in a bowl with no flow or biomedia would have some bacteria on the surfaces, but not enough to process the waste fast enough. So it is underfiltered and the ammonia acculumates and the fish dies.