PVC Canister revised - Made 2 of em

Hi,

A longtime pending update to my Homemade Canister....

The canister had a leak after an accident and the lid system didnt proved good for many a reasons, so it needed a change...and thats why I couldnt respond to most of your queries earlier. My apologies....

Previous one can be found here - http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=172675(compare the new modifications withe the old link)

So heres how I modified it further...

Modification 1 - The lid design is improved.
It uses 6 bolts, one on each of its side(of hexagon) to hold together two 6mm thick hexagonal acrylic sheets, one attached to the canister body and other holds the pump and acts as a lid.

The bottom part..


The lid with pump attached.


These Polypropylene(PP) bolts are used to secure the hood, these can be tightened by hands with ease.



Modification 2 - To the base a tank barb is attached along with an elbow and further a push barb to insert into a flexible pipe.



You can also notice the crude sealing(black sealant) for the bottom lid to waterproof the joint.

Modification 3 - The long ugly, leaky ball valve attachments were replaced by pvc union ball valves, that can be seen in the picture below.


Now all the parts that undergo impairment overtime(like barbs and valves) they have been made replaceable with temporary(but strong) joints using tephlon tape instead of some permanent adhesive. Now this doesnt makes the canister disposable due to minor issues.
Previously canister inlet cracked when it slipped off my hands down the staircase and the crack was irrepairable. So I wanted to have this feature, specifically.

I have leak tested it at high pressure(keeping the water container 2meter from ground and more than 3' apart from the canister) for a couple of week now and its successfully running on my planted tank for about 6 months.

Heres the tank(sorry for bad pic), you can see the (a bit)ugly inlet and outlet here. Wanted to go for lilly pipes, but am a little too ruff when it comes to handling brittle things, so kept these.



So here it is, my canister as a whole....



It uses pot scrubs>coarse thick sponge>fine filter wool from bottom to top as filtration media and does an effective job.

It set me off around 25-30$ for complete thing with filtration media.

It works as good as any branded filter with similar flow and capacity.

Looking forward to your comments/queries on this....

With one canister running perfectly, I rolled out my second one, larger than the first.

5" PVC pipe about 20" tall with respective null cap and a round socket formed the canister body. 6mm acrylic sheet was used to make the lid in the same manner as the previous one. The inlet and the outlet, the Union Ball valves, the pipe and all barbs are 3/4". This uses 8-bolts instead of 6 as the canister diameter is larger than the previous one. The canister uses a 1200 LPH el-cheapo Chinese pump(read the name in second picture ), that can easily push the water through 3/4" pipe easily upto 6' from ground without loss of much flow. Again, I have a provision for replacement of most parts if needed, making it indispensable for a good long time.

Altogether it took me 2 days on and off on this project, thats considerably much much better time than the previous one.

Yet I have to get the PP/nylon bolts for this one, they were out of stock at the moment.

Note - This was done for a friend of mine, and is working well for around 3 months on his tank and all put together this costed around 40$ without media.

There are no internal compartments/containers for media, as I believe they let a bit of matter bypass the media.
The first layer is a big pile of pot scrubs wrapped in fine nylon net to hold together and the next layer is coarse filter sponge and the last layer is fine filter wool. Thats it!

Canister as a whole.


The lid


Big brother(size comparison)





Cheers!