Both of my 125's, are ran off of 3 AC 500's. (110's) AC sponge at bottom to collect the big chunks, then topped off with some blue/white media to collect the finer stuff, topped off with a bag of bio-media. (bio-max rings, Seachem matrix mix)
Which reminded of a post I made here a while back......
Correct, which got me to thinking of a fish shop located south of me that an Indonesian couple run. I used to supply them with dry goods years ago and one night I was there after hours watching one of their workers clean their filters on their 325 gallon display tank. This was a tank that varied with stock over the many years that I have frequented this store, but it was always a heavy bio-load of adult fish. Lots of large colorful fish to wow the customers. It was one of those "not for sale" tanks, that everyone of course wanted to purchase from.
This tank was filtered by 3 AC 500"s (old school 110's), each filter contained two large AC sponges, and was topped with floss. No speciality "bio-media" at all, just sponges, and floss. Each week they did a 40-50% water change, and cleaned the filters when the output slowed down. I don't recall if filter cleaning was performed weekly, bi-weekly, or what? The cleaning invovled rinsing the sponges in tank water, and the floss got tossed at each cleaning, with fresh floss going back in at the top.
That display tank ran that way for decades, and I believe is still running with the same filtration today. Just goes to show how much bio-bacteria can actually colonize an AC sponge, and how efficiently sponges alone can be in supporting a large bio-load of fish.
