Well, after reading this whole thread I'm sold! I have a new 80gal going up soon and was researching my filtration needs when someone pointed me this direction. I never thought that a simple sponge could be such a powerful filtration tool. It honestly sounds from my reading that two of these bad boys w/powerheads on them will MORE than handle all of my filtration needs for an overstocked 80gal aquarium. I love the benefits discussed here and I've been wanting to find ways to lower my noise and power consumption levels. This seems like the perfect answer really. Not sure why everyone doesn't do this. Are there downsides? I've seen these and thought 1) they looked ugly and 2) didn't think they could possible flow that much water. Now that I'm reading this I'm finding that it's not too hard to hide them if you want and they actually flow a LOT more than I had figured previously. One question is will a powerhead flow too much? In other words can you pull the particulate right through the foam and blast it back into the aquarium or does this matter? I'm just envisioning tons of flow from the powerheads if a small airstone can pull sufficient flow and don't want to overdo it if it's possible.
The only downside I can see from doing it this way is that they won't be in the tank. This means you lose the benefit of them being in the tank itself should you lose power. This was another selling point and I rarely if ever lose power but the thought that I can hit the tank itself with some sort of circulation via battery power and all of my filters will remain cycled.gt1009;4822513; said:Random idea here, but I'm thinking now about putting a smaller sponge filter in my sump. Anyone else ever try this? You could get all the benefits of a sponge filter without the downside of having an unsightly sponge filter in the display. You could probably theoretically remove a wetdry chamber on the sump, and fill that space with sponge filters run off a single large air pump. As long as your sump doesn't have downwards water flow in the chamber you put the sponge in. In that case, you would probably have to use a small powerhead.