Your current Fish tank Setups!

Seems to make sense re: course to fine.

So I'm thinking water in, corse, nitrax pad (effectively medium), floss, carbon, ceramic, then 2 medium sponges.

Will the medium sponges be sufficient for bacteria? Or should I replace the final 2 with more ceramics?
 
Cheers.

We went to pets at home and all their tanks have no substrate in them, just a couple of small ornaments, why do they do this? Sure it's not very good for the fish to not have substrate in there?

We won't be getting anything from them, just curious as to why they do this when the garden center and aquatic shop we visited have proper tanks for substrate and plants in.
 
Having no substrate is perfect for a fish store. They turnover fish like no tomorrow and gravel can hide parasites and gets filled with fish dung and with the fish load they run just become nitrate factories.

Bare bottom allows you to keep the tank clean and all the dung goes into the sump and is manually removed. When you are constantly netting fish it will stir up all sorts of particles from the gravel and look terrible for an hour every time.


To answer the question on jewel filter media. Ignore the instructions, seriously burn them.
Do not change the media unless it is falling apart which takes almost a decade. Do not bother with the nitrax or carbon pads, again they are a waste of money. If you have them already just put them in and leave them. Again don’t bother buying ceramic media unless it comes with it, it’s a waste of money and makes no difference. The size of the jewel filter media is more than sufficient for the size of tank and provides more than enough surface area for the amount of fish you can get in it. You could run the whole tank off one medium sponge filter. Run your sponges in the following order:
Course
Medium
Fine
Special(carbon, nitrax, ceramic)
Floss

The only thing you need to routinely change is the floss again don’t buy the official stuff it’s a complete rip off. Go on eBay and search for filter floss, buy a lifetime supply for less than £10 delivered. Rise (squeeze repeatedly) the sponges in old tank water when you do maintenance. You don’t need to do it every time but they will eventually clog the time is takes to do that depends on how many/size of the fish.

I am all for spending the cash where it makes a difference but special filter media is a complete rip off especially stuff like biohome.
 
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It depends on what you are trying to grow.

Root feeding plants (like crypts) prefer one but you can use root tabs and go without for undemanding species. It also depends on what type of substrate you are using.

Sand is the most difficult as it doesn’t easily let the poop down into the roots and likewise often compacts which cuts off oxygen to the roots so it is a double whammy. Plants are also easily uprooted and you can’t stir up the sand yourself for the same reasons.

All plants do better when you also use a liquid fertiliser.
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
Having no substrate is perfect for a fish store. They turnover fish like no tomorrow and gravel can hide parasites and gets filled with fish dung and with the fish load they run just become nitrate factories.

Bare bottom allows you to keep the tank clean and all the dung goes into the sump and is manually removed. When you are constantly netting fish it will stir up all sorts of particles from the gravel and look terrible for an hour every time.


To answer the question on jewel filter media. Ignore the instructions, seriously burn them.
Do not change the media unless it is falling apart which takes almost a decade. Do not bother with the nitrax or carbon pads, again they are a waste of money. If you have them already just put them in and leave them. Again don’t bother buying ceramic media unless it comes with it, it’s a waste of money and makes no difference. The size of the jewel filter media is more than sufficient for the size of tank and provides more than enough surface area for the amount of fish you can get in it. You could run the whole tank off one medium sponge filter. Run your sponges in the following order:
Course
Medium
Fine
Special(carbon, nitrax, ceramic)
Floss

The only thing you need to routinely change is the floss again don’t buy the official stuff it’s a complete rip off. Go on eBay and search for filter floss, buy a lifetime supply for less than £10 delivered. Rise (squeeze repeatedly) the sponges in old tank water when you do maintenance. You don’t need to do it every time but they will eventually clog the time is takes to do that depends on how many/size of the fish.

I am all for spending the cash where it makes a difference but special filter media is a complete rip off especially stuff like biohome.
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lol biohome and the likes are far superior to ceramic vastly more surface area don't know where you getting it's a rip off from.
 
Contrary to popular belief you don’t need a tennis court of surface area per fish in your filter. Filters these days are absolutely massive and can support huge amounts of fish on standard media. What filters tend to lack is the ability to adequately circulate the water around the whole tank on their own, hence why most people ‘oversize’. Their ability to to support life is never in question.

If you read my post I never said the product was bad or didn’t offer larger surface areas. What I said was it is a waste of money as it actually offers no benefit over a sponge that costs 50p. Before you start attracting my post perhaps you want to backup what you say with some rational thoughts.

As with most things in the aquarium hobby marketing is king and the actual benefit to your fish is limited at best. There is a real honey trap of spending your money on nonsense that has very little benefit in the real world.

The claimed nitrate removing properties of biohome are complete nonsense in the way that you suggested using it. If you use it in a fast flowing canister/internal filter then you are never going to meet the low oxygen requirements needed to produce anorobic bacteria that remove nitrates.

Nitrates are also not that harmful to fish and will never become toxic in a correctly stocked and maintained tank. Hell I get 35ppm out of my tap before it even hits the tank. The sole aim of a water change is not to just remove nitrates, there are a whole host of other benefits.

Also if you actually think about how ceramic and biohome work in the real world you will realise they are not all that beneficial. They get clogged up with small particles really easily and the large pellet size allows water to just channel around them.

To reiterate I never said they were a bad product, I said they were a waste of money as the benefits are limited at best, especially if you already have something suitable to use like the person that asked the question!
 
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I don't agree, more bacteria in a tank to proccess waste is better than a crappy sponge filter, you can't have to much filtration, look at the standard fluval evo system totally not suited to a saltwater setup even though it's sold as one, my three tanks are all running sweet thanks to my setups, each to their own i guess.
 
Just curious, what other benefits does the 20% water change bring besides the nitrate removal?

I think I found my answer: "...while water changes will remove pollutants and replenish diminished elements (calcium, potassium, iron, zinc) necessary for a balanced aquarium."
 
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Spook187 said:
I don't agree, more bacteria in a tank to proccess waste is better than a crappy sponge filter, you can't have to much filtration, look at the standard fluval evo system totally not suited to a saltwater setup even though it's sold as one, my three tanks are all running sweet thanks to my setups, each to their own i guess.
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Again this is another common misconception.

More surface area does not equal more bacteria.

The number of bacteria will be limited by the amount of food (aka ammonia, nitrite) that is available to them and no more.

The amount of surface area is almost irellevent as long as there is sufficient surface area to support the numbers of bacteria needed. All that increasing the surface area does above this base level is just spread the same number of bacteria out over a wider area.

This is the main reason as to why you don’t suddenly increase your fish load or feeding as the bacteria takes 24 hours to double in numbers and there is not normally any ‘spare’ bacteria because it dies off without sufficient food.

The actual amount of surface area needed is much smaller than most people think they need. Many old school fish stores don’t run central sump systems and run individual tanks off sponge filters. You will see 80L tanks holding 200+ neon tetras with zero ammonia and nitrite all on a single sponge filter.

I’m not saying you should all go out and buy sponger filters (they are ugly and do not have a home in a display tank) but the point is you don’t need huge surface areas to filter a tank.
 
PiKe said:
Just curious, what other benefits does the 20% water change bring besides the nitrate removal?

I think I found my answer: "...while water changes will remove pollutants and replenish diminished elements (calcium, potassium, iron, zinc) necessary for a balanced aquarium."
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I can answer that with my community tank as a prime example
I run a community tank of 300L which iv owned a long while now. I do a water change every 3 months as it stands as my plants do such a job iv nothing to remove. I only water change to replace elements in the water but i may even dose elements soon and do no water changes ever. This doesnt mean u don't need to vac for poo though or do weekly filter maintainence.
 
So.. im winning my battle it seems. With chemicals :) Adding excital to my marine now at recommended daily dose. 3 days in with 2 days to go. But iv noticed a boom of white film algae which is bacteria rapidly multiplying on any surface it can and its took the wind out the cyno for sure. Nitrate hasn't dropped or moved yet were still at 20ppm according to my api kit so i guess stable is better than a rise and my corals are happy :)
 
Unicorn said:
So.. im winning my battle it seems. With chemicals :) Adding excital to my marine now at recommended daily dose. 3 days in with 2 days to go. But iv noticed a boom of white film algae which is bacteria rapidly multiplying on any surface it can and its took the wind out the cyno for sure. Nitrate hasn't dropped or moved yet were still at 20ppm according to my api kit so i guess stable is better than a rise and my corals are happy :)
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Are you still dosing nopox, could be overdoing that side with the white film.
 
Unicorn said:
So.. im winning my battle it seems. With chemicals :) Adding excital to my marine now at recommended daily dose. 3 days in with 2 days to go. But iv noticed a boom of white film algae which is bacteria rapidly multiplying on any surface it can and its took the wind out the cyno for sure. Nitrate hasn't dropped or moved yet were still at 20ppm according to my api kit so i guess stable is better than a rise and my corals are happy :)
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Personally id throw the api kit away and invest in the red sea tests. Or keep the api and take it as a “around this number” figure

Also nopox is great but overdosing it is catastrophic so take it slow and dont just stop using it all of a sudden if possible
 
As we are newbies to this, I realise chlorinated water kills bacteria, so how do you do the initial 75% water change before adding plants/fish? Do you for whilst the tap water goes in? Or fill buckets and dose each one?
 
Either is fine, I just dose the tank directly (always dose for the entire volume of the tank if doing this) as it’s easier than doing each bucket individually.

Seachem Prime is great value but Seachem Safe is even better. It’s essentially a powdered version of Prime.
 
Spook187 said:
Are you still dosing nopox, could be overdoing that side with the white film.
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3ml per 100l at my current Nitrate levels is what redsea recommend. Im happy with it though to be honest if the bacteria are living they will do the job. Once iv stamped out cyno for good i shall move away from no3pox slowly and bring my biopellet reactor into play. Its been sat boxed up for a month now waiting
 
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