My dream is to one day have a 400 gallon predator tank. Unfortunately, those setups are expensive. So my plan is to make as much of the equipment for it as possible. I was looking up DIY canister filters, and was looking at the various medias people packed theirs with and it got me thinking; if i had a multiple canister design, strung together with tubing, could I pack one of them with small gravel? It would house a heck of a lot of bacteria, and would be a cleanable alternative to things like filter floss or disposable mechanical filter media. All I would need to do is unhook that particular canister, lug it outside, and dump it onto a screen that is too fine for the gravel to slip through, before rinsing it off with the hose. does this sound feasible? or would i be better off with a canister of filter media and a thing of bio balls or bio plastic?
using Gravel for filtration?
- Thread starter SkeptikalScabies
- Start date
Hello; Some decades ago I packed an external filter with glass marbles. I placed layers of finer filter material over the marbles. the finer layers trapped most of the detritus and could be cleaned/replaced as needed. The marbles created a lot of spaces between them that allowed good flow of the water. The marbles had decent surface area, were non toxic and easy to clean when necessary.
Another good and perhaps even cheaper media for bacteria was coarse aquarium charcoal. I was able to get fairly large bags of coarse charcoal about pea sized. The adsorption property of the charcoal was used up after a few days but the stuff was porous. I would make a base layer of the charcoal and leave it in a filter as a substrate for bacteria to colonize.
After a long time the charcoal would become pretty well clogged up but could be cleaned. I would rinse the dirty charcoal and then bake it in an oven. The rinsing would remove much of the material and the baking would cook off much of the detritus and leave the charcoal still fairly porous. For a time I thought the baking restored the adsorption properties but have been told a conventional house oven does not get hot enough to do that. At any rate the baking cleaned out much of the material that clogged the pores of the charcoal and left it useful as a biomedia surface.
Another good and perhaps even cheaper media for bacteria was coarse aquarium charcoal. I was able to get fairly large bags of coarse charcoal about pea sized. The adsorption property of the charcoal was used up after a few days but the stuff was porous. I would make a base layer of the charcoal and leave it in a filter as a substrate for bacteria to colonize.
After a long time the charcoal would become pretty well clogged up but could be cleaned. I would rinse the dirty charcoal and then bake it in an oven. The rinsing would remove much of the material and the baking would cook off much of the detritus and leave the charcoal still fairly porous. For a time I thought the baking restored the adsorption properties but have been told a conventional house oven does not get hot enough to do that. At any rate the baking cleaned out much of the material that clogged the pores of the charcoal and left it useful as a biomedia surface.
gravel filtration would be great cheap mechanical and bio filtration just be sure to add a backwash feature in it to clean out the filter once in a while.
Have you thought about fluidized bed filters? I'm making my own for a 400+g predator tank, you could use the gravel or as I'm doing, k1. Just put some layers of mechanical filtration in before the water gets to the gravel.
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You can build a DIY Birdman sand and gravel filter: http://www.koiphen.com/forums/showthread.php?68132-Birdman-s-Sand-Gravel-Filter
that fluidized sandbed filter is actually the same design i was thinking of, only with gravel instead of sand. Id just have to find a screen somewhere that would allow water to pass through and would withhold the sand should i ever want to clean the filter, you know, so i dont end up with soggy, sandy carpeting.