Hello; I dug out an old air powered HOB filter a year or so ago. I had kept enough of them to have parts to get it running. I now have it running on a QT along with a sponge filter. I had to bleed off some air so figured to run that excess air thru the old filter. I may have enough parts to run one more but so many are cracked or broken. I do not know if such can be purchased anymore.
Washing Your Bio
- Thread starter benzjamin13
- Start date
Well, different cities have different water. The chlorine dosage can vary from city to city let alone from a country to another. What might be ok for you might wipe someone else's colony.
Plus, it's not that much effort to use tank water if you are already doing a water change. You can also fill it with the old water, it's not a great deal of volume
Hello; Again the argument ( from my viewpoint) is not that tap water is necessarily "safe" to clean bio-media with. More that in some cases the simple rinse in "old tank water" is not enough.
For example the various tubes that channel the water thru filters will over time build up hick coatings of gunk. To the point of restricting flow to some degree. I have tried a simple rinse with poor results. I have tried flushing with a hose with slightly better results. What I wind up doing is to run a brush thru the tubes to loosen the gunk and restore good flow. Before I do this level of cleaning I make sure to preserve some bb loaded media.
Maybe I am the only one whose stuff gets gunked up over time and many of you do just fine with the gentle rinse. To each his/her own. So far we each get to run our tanks any way we wish. I am not on a crusade to overthrow the current dogma, just pointing out a practice I use.
I learned this over time from experience of having fish tanks over the last 30 years.- not something I could explain to others "why" like you can- just that it worked.
I think this was because I learned fish-keeping not from others- no one I knew had fish 30 years ago- but from books. This is prior to the Internet, mind you. Books were your primary source for information, especially when everyone else around you only saw fish at aquarium stores. Which were few and far between where I lived.
My practices are often seen as strange: So be it.
MY biological media is always cleaned ( in rotation) with tap.
I change out a 1/4 of my bio-media per year for new.
Mechanical media is just that-mechanical. If you are using it as biological you are diminishing its purpose and efficiency as intended.
I do not keep my sponges until "they disintegrate". Have you ever noticed how they lose their ability to mechanically remove debris as they fibers break down? Why would you want to wait until they disintegrate- because you are using them as biological media.
These practices will make some fish-keepers on forums very angry that you dare to say you do them or believe they work.
I don't get how its "not enough", I meant in my post that you rinse the biomedia in tank water. If you are getting any kind of flow restriction you can use the brush meant to clean baby bottles. Of coarse everyone should do what he thinks if right
Well, biofilm grows in every surface disregarding someone's intentions. So technically they work as both mechanical and biological.
I do strongly feel that even if cleaning my Bio under tap kills off all the BB from the filter, there is sufficient amount of BB within the tank (on the glass, substrate, rocks, driftwood, and decor). We also preach overfiltration which makes me think how much BB is already within my system? Am I able to get away with breaking one of the fish keeping commandments because there’s plenty of BB within my tank?
Yes, of course biofilm grows on this surface. However, I dont use it as a means of biological filtration. It is used for its mechanical ability to trap debris, which means it is rinsed and cleaned and replaced as often as needed to maintain its ability to do this.
I agree with Feshman, clearly some tubes, lines etc require a more thorough cleaning from time to time - but if we are only discussing bio-media, I have been running the same media, in the same bags, for approx. 15 yrs now. Other than some swishing in de-chlorinated tap water every few months, I have never needed to hose them off. I also clean all of my mechanical media, and swish all of those bio-media bags, all in the same day. I've been doing that for many years, without so much as a hiccup. But I know my set ups, my disinfectant residuals, tap water parameters such a pH, alkalinity, hardness, water temp, etc, so I know from experience what I can pull off safely, in my tanks.
