trickle filters newby.

[Monk]

hey there,

I wouldn't call my self completly new in the aquarium hobby, but i am far from a pro. I learn everything from the internet or books but sometimes it's hard to grasp some things without somebody with first hand experience giving you tips and pointers. I've been trying to research trickle (or sump?) filters but i'm having trouble peicing all that info together to actually get a picture in my head of how the whole system really works, from the time the water leaves the tank...to when it returns.

At the moment i've been using cannister filters for my tanks, and i've had no problems with them yet. But they are on tanks with less of a biological load on them. But my 120gal (which i've mentioned before on here) is the largest tank i own, and i think i need to step up my filtration. I have an eheim pro. 2, with the in line heater, along with a powerhead to provide extra current and oxygen.

So heres your chance to tell me what im doing wrong, or what i can do to keep my oscars happy, and healthy.

Thanks alot,
Ryan

 

[Nic]

water flows from tank to sump throught some kind of mechanical pad then trickels over bio media bacteria eat waste etc amonia nitrite poss nitrate then gets pumped back to the tank they are really simple keep the eheim and do a small wet dry that would be real good for the tank plus in the sump you can put a heater so you dont have a ugly cord in the back ground hope that helps
Nic

 

[cougar579]

Check your water parameters. Not healthy your Oscars are? Give them a couple of large water changes twice a week and see what happens.

 

[craig]

[QUOTE=Monk]hey there,

I wouldn't call my self completly new in the aquarium hobby, but i am far from a pro. I learn everything from the internet or books but sometimes it's hard to grasp some things without somebody with first hand experience giving you tips and pointers. I've been trying to research trickle (or sump?) filters but i'm having trouble peicing all that info together to actually get a picture in my head of how the whole system really works, from the time the water leaves the tank...to when it returns.

At the moment i've been using cannister filters for my tanks, and i've had no problems with them yet. But they are on tanks with less of a biological load on them. But my 120gal (which i've mentioned before on here) is the largest tank i own, and i think i need to step up my filtration. I have an eheim pro. 2, with the in line heater, along with a powerhead to provide extra current and oxygen.

So heres your chance to tell me what im doing wrong, or what i can do to keep my oscars happy, and healthy.

Thanks alot,
Ryan[/QUOTE]

[ATTACH=full]15457[/ATTACH]

 

[Monk]

Thanks alot guys...that really helped me out.

now i have one more question.
I'm going to keep the eheim, and it will pump the water to the wet/dry (as nic suggested). The Eheim pumps 277 gph, when i get a pump so return the water to the tank, i'd have to find one that pumps 277 gph? or can they differ a bit?

thanks again,
Ryan

 

[vanimate]

Not healthy your Oscars are?

Ok Yoda

 

[Bawb2u]

I think you've got yourself confused. You don't want the Eheim to have anyting to do with the wet/dry, you want to have two totally seperate systems. You want to have an overflow box in the tank that will take water down into your wet/dry and a seperate pump or powerhead to return water to your tank. Here's a couple of links that show how these work.
How a wet/dry works
How an overflow box works

 

[qumqats]

Here's another picture of a wet/dry trickle. THe filter is on the bottom of the picture. The 29G tank on top is there as a comparison of how large this filter is.

This is one that I'll be using for a 180G and 60G I have. Rather then two separate systems I'm combining the filtration for the two tanks.

The two pipes on top right will have water being fed to them from a pre-filter that has water from the two tanks being fed to it. You want to make sure you have lots of mechanical filtration before the Wet/Dry. You don't want stuff gunking up the bio-media. The water goes through a layer of filter media that is on the drip tray. The drip tray is above the bio-balls and is just a flat sheet with lots of holes in it. These holes evenly distribute the water across the bio-balls so that they all have a stream of water trickling across them. The water trickles down through the bio-balls. This is where the bio filtration occurs. There are colonies of bacteria living on the bio-balls. As the water flows across them they do the ammonia->nitrite and nitrite->nitrate conversions. After this the water drips down to the bottom of the filter into the sump. After flowing to the left through another foam block the water gets pumped back up into the aquarium.

Very simple. Once this gets setup and the nitrogen cycle is established all you have to worry about is cleaning the mechanical filters and making sure you don't have a pump fail. The last thing you want to happen in any bio-filter is for the bacterial colonies to die, so you have to keep the water flowing.