Interesting idea, looking forward to seeing how it progresses if you put it into practice as removing the physical waste before it has a chance to break down and pollute the water is an often over-looked aspect of mechanical filtration. I like the idea of an easy to clean pre-filter before the filter socks and have toyed with several different designs for my up and coming tank build, I'll be keeping several large Panaques so with the amount of sawdust they make I'll need to have some sort of pre-filter or I'll be cleaning the socks daily.
This is what I'm running on my current over-stocked 400L tank, its sort of a crude low-tech (but very effective) version of what you're planning...
Just a standard fish net sitting on top of the filter wool that I can remove daily and rinse under the hose. And yep, that is ~24hours worth of crap in the second pic! Before I started running the net the filter wool in the sump only lasted a couple of days before completely clogging, now I can get 5-7 days depending on how heavily I feed. I must admit I can't take credit for the idea, a friend runs a similar system on his ~3000L tank.
Wow! Very cool to see something like this. Thanks for sharing, I think if possible its always better to remove rather than break down waste. Clogs are absolutely a concern for my intended setup so we'll see how it works!
Those pics are cool because I completely made up my planned setup and have basically one shot at it. Its good to see another setup. The screen is a couple hundred bucks for one, so if I mess it up, thats pretty much it for this concept.
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