8 Hydro Sponge V's only filtration for 360 gallon
- Thread starter inline4
- Start date
Hello; you may be correct that he means HOB but back in the day there were box filters run by air that were filled with floss and or charcoal. These entire filters were placed inside a tank much as sponge filters are.
the box filters were usually made of clear plastic with compartments and some sort of air bubble way to pull water thru the floss.
I may have one or two in a box somewhere. They had very little advantage over a sponge filter. They may have a greater capacity to trap detritus.
I say just use two larger sponges with powerheads. I use one aquatop 250 with a 600 gph powerhead on my 150 gallon and it works great.
Box filters are air driven and great for mechanical filtration (in addition to some bio, depending on what you put in them): https://www.jehmco.com/html/box_filters.html
Coupling box filters with sponge filters is a great way to reduce the frequency of having to clean the sponges (which is a PITA). I run a bunch of air through the box filters (which have some gravel in the bottom and pillow stuffing from Michaels) and less air through the sponges (because bio works better with less flow and so that they don't get clogged as frequently). I also use a lot of Poret (with relatively low flow). I clean the box filters (dump out the gunk, replace dirty fluff with clean) as I'm refilling tanks during weekly water changes.
Nearly my whole fishroom is run on a couple of air pumps. I don't use HOBs, canisters, etc. to reduce power consumption and because they're pains to clean.
I may have to do this. I want the sponge filters mainly for mechanical filtration anyhow. I have plenty of BIO. Just have to figure a way to pretty them up.
