Got my fx5 today..... Woooooohhoooooooo!!! Set it up took 1 hour 30 mins... No the 40 mins iy said....lol that might just be me though! Its only been running for about 1 hour and my water is already clearer..... But its not quite as powerful as i thought it would be, still a powerful filter though! Now just canter wait till its settled and cycled then i can get rid of the internal filter
New FX5 delivered yesterday and....
- Thread starter Getmuddy350
- Start date
Mu tank is getting cleaner and cleaner. I added the media today. I put the top 2 trays with 3 boxes of Fluval Bio Max then in the bottom tray I ran 2 coarse and 1 fine water polishing pads. We'll see how it works out. Here is a few pics from the install. I ended up having to cut 2 new holes in the 3/4" acrylic lid. Every time I drill into the tank I get the sick feeling in my stomach. So far I am satisfied. In 4 weeks I plan to turn my 50 gallon sump off to see if this filter will handle the tank. If so I am going to have a new 50g breeder tank in the bottom of my main tank, 
where did you hear that? They are awesome, I run 2 on my 220, 1 filled with biomax and the other filled with Seachem Matrix. Never had a serious issue with them, just had to replace a couple of lid fasteners on one and the drain valve on another that got jammed up.
I would not recommend using the pads in the tank, they will clog fast and reduce the flow of the tank. It flows at 900gph when there is no media in the filter, once you add media it drops down to 600gph. When I tried the pads at first in 2 weeks or so they were already severely dropping the flow rate.
They're a pain to service and have a tendency to spit micro bubbles.
If it spits micro bubbles it means something in interfering with the flow, clogged pads, to much media, etc... And I can completely clean both of mine in 2 hrs or less.
Two Hammerheads on a 350 g might be too much.
We use one Hammerhead on our 300 gallon tank. We have a very strong current. Here's video during a water change.
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The current is so powerful, Our lutino oscar went body surfy\ing
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Spreaking of getting stuck my browser always crashes on this site. This site only. I just downloaded a microsoft silverstream and it saya it will resolve/recover pages better. We will see. Thanks for the input on the filters. I plan to remove the top filter weekly if not bi-weekly. I need to run a permanent line to the drain setup so I can get the lid off easily then swap that top one out. We will see how it works out. I can say since I added the media it is 100x cleaner when it comes to small chunks of food floating around. Part of that is me overfeeding. I need to fix that myself, but its so fun to watch them eat..
Yeah now that I think about it the guy I brought the setup from had a whole garage full of those 100g rubber made containers he was harvesting liverock in. It was all disasembled when I bought the tank, but I bet he had 8 of those plus the tank. I only planned to use 1 of those hammerheads on that tank. The tank has 3 2" drains in the bottom of it then it returns to 8 1" down spouts mounted in the top of the tank. The refugium alone was 100g. I should have passed on the setup as the tank is scratched to hell. I was going to buy a buffer sand it all down them clean it up one day. Once I got it to the house I realized it would not fit anywhere so its on the bakc burned until we build a house in a few years. Its going to be a room divider then. I hope it turns out nice. If not I will have a long coat closet!
I run three on my 210 and they are great, just don't use too much filter sponge material as they get clogged so quickly! Water clarity is great though
