Hello; Early on in the first decades of my fish keeping I ran tanks with only air pump filters, air stones and the like. I used under gravel filters and still do. I used little in tank box filters stuffed with floss. I used sponge filters. I used hang on back filters powered by air bubbles. I used simple air stones with no filter media at all. I am not talking powerful air pumps. Just the sort a teenager could afford from mowing yards for a dollar a yard and other similarly paid jobs.
I experienced the slow transition from air operated filters to impeller run power filters. As far as I am concerned the current power filters would not have happened without the simple air run filters. The early Metaframe power HOB's moved a lot more water than the air type but they lost siphon pretty much every day. Not like modern stuff which will restart on their own. You had little plastic caps on a stick with which you could re-start the siphon. I always ran some sort of bubbler along with the power filters. If I had to use only one sort of filter for a tank it would be air run. Likely a sponge filter nowadays. I still have some survivor air HOB's and do use them in grow out tanks with fry.
When i use a sponge filter in a bare tank I rarely clean it. It eventually becomes mainly a weight to keep the air bubble source at the bottom. The sponge sort of gets "clogged up" I guess but something else happens. A story. Some years ago I bought a few common angel fish cichlids. Wound up with a breeding pair (did a thread on them on here) They always ate the eggs, so I set up a grow out tank. They liked to lay on live plant leaves so I would clip the leaf and put it in the grow out tank. I would weigh down the leaf and position a bubble stone close by to keep the water moving.
I also threw in a very mature sponge filter run by air. The idea being it would circulate water when I removed the leaf & air stone after hatching. Also wouldnot suck small fry in like a power filter. I raised a few batches of fry in that tank and never cleaned the sponge. Point of the story being the fry would graze on the surface of the sponge when they became free swimming. Not sure exactly what they found but the exposed surface of the sponge. I have some guesses. The sponge would be cleaned nicely during a period before they grew enough to take other foods. The sponge would get a bit fuzzy between batches of fry. It is more than a simple trash collector.
Back to the above quote. jjohnwm tells the story well. To the OP, run the sponge setup which pleases you. Figure it will work well along with water changes even with half the sponges. likely with a quarter of the sponges or maybe one sponge. Likely with half the cleaning frequency or perhaps no sponge cleaning at all.
Jeep up the water changes (WC) and likely all will be well. We have to do WC no matter what filters we use.
Wow, this post ^ is a real blast from the past! I remember all that stuff as well; cleaning out box filters that were filled not with filter floss as we know it today, but rather with actual spun fibreglass, i.e. the same stuff that is still in use today as attic insulation. My first HOB power filter, a monstrous AquaKing Supreme that had an air-cooled motor, replete with slots for air movement, mounted above the filter box with a shaft running down to the impeller chamber in the water. My first air pump, an electric motor attached to a shaft and cam that moved an external piston up and down to pump the air; it looked...and sounded...like a miniature locomotive engine.
I never got to play with undergravel filters until a bit later, as my father's simple edict was "No! Da **** is still in da tank!" and setting up such a filter would interfere with our protocol of draining the tank completely and removing/washing/replacing all the gravel...every week!
I still have tanks up to 120-gallons that are filtered entirely by air-driven filters: Poret foam columns, 6x6x19 inches, pre-drilled lengthwise and using 1.25 or 1.5 inch tubing with an airstone or two can move a lot of water and go many months without cleaning. They're essentially stand-alone Hamburg Mattenfilters. No, they aren't "efficient", I suppose...but they are far more than adequate for the purpose of maintaining excellent water quality.
I'd have to say that the single most important forward step in aquarium keeping for me was my initial discovery of Tetra sponge filters back around 1970, which set me on the road towards getting a handle on the whole nitrogen cycle and biological filtration concept. Sponge filters rule! Saying that they are inefficient may be technically accurate...but everything is relative, and sponges still easily do far more work than virtually any tank requires.
Now, let's chat about this new-fangled stuff that apparently lets us glue one piece of glass to another to build a tank without a frame; silicone, I think it's called? And apparently some folks are even making aquariums out of pieces of
plastic glued together!
I know, right? Can't possible work; I think people are in for a surprise when those things start falling apart any day now...
