Does anyone else apart from me use a Fluidized Bed Sand Filter and if so how do you rate it?
I got mine out of shear desperation 2 weeks after setting up my 6x2x2 tank for my R.T.C and being unable to keep ammonia and nitrite levels low enough to be deemed acceptable, my lfs advised one of these filters as the volume of bacteria held with in them can be anything up to 10 times that of a large standard external filter :0 , add to this the fact that the media is constantly moving around and colliding thus rubbing off old bacteria so that new bacteria can establish and it should keep toxin levels down.
So i bit the bullett and handed over my hard earned cash for a Rainbow Lifegaurd FB300 which as luck would have it was on special offer at £90 with a free powerhead chucked into the bargain
, my lfs also gave me some mature media from one of their sand filters that they run on all of their large tanks (thats how much they trust them) to get me going once i got home.
So i got home and set up the filter as per the destructions lol opps i mean instructions and left it running overnight before performing a water test, next morning i performed a water test and BINGO!!!!!! no ammonia and no nitrite?, i thought this too good to be true so i performed a second water test just in case i had missed my hand with the first ones lol (i use liquid test kits as they are more accurate than the tablet ones and as for these test strips that you can get well im sorry i dont trust them at all lol) anyways the second test confimed that there was no ammonia or nitrite in the system, now for the really amazing bit ...............i hadnt even performed a water change at this point so the levels in the tank when the filter was installed were still at very high concentrations but still this filter had completely stripped all of the toxins from the water in less than 18 hours :0
I now plan (as finances allow) to fit these filters to all of my larger tanks as they are in my opinion the mutts nuts and i'd rather be safe than sorry
I also have a friend in the lfc who keeps Discus in a large tank filtered by a sand filter only with no other filters installed so as to get no build up of toxins in the filter media of a standard filter............he just simply syphons off any solid waste each week on a water change and has had no problems at all using this system
I got mine out of shear desperation 2 weeks after setting up my 6x2x2 tank for my R.T.C and being unable to keep ammonia and nitrite levels low enough to be deemed acceptable, my lfs advised one of these filters as the volume of bacteria held with in them can be anything up to 10 times that of a large standard external filter :0 , add to this the fact that the media is constantly moving around and colliding thus rubbing off old bacteria so that new bacteria can establish and it should keep toxin levels down.
So i bit the bullett and handed over my hard earned cash for a Rainbow Lifegaurd FB300 which as luck would have it was on special offer at £90 with a free powerhead chucked into the bargain
, my lfs also gave me some mature media from one of their sand filters that they run on all of their large tanks (thats how much they trust them) to get me going once i got home.So i got home and set up the filter as per the destructions lol opps i mean instructions
and left it running overnight before performing a water test, next morning i performed a water test and BINGO!!!!!! no ammonia and no nitrite?, i thought this too good to be true so i performed a second water test just in case i had missed my hand with the first ones lol (i use liquid test kits as they are more accurate than the tablet ones and as for these test strips that you can get well im sorry i dont trust them at all lol) anyways the second test confimed that there was no ammonia or nitrite in the system, now for the really amazing bit ...............i hadnt even performed a water change at this point so the levels in the tank when the filter was installed were still at very high concentrations but still this filter had completely stripped all of the toxins from the water in less than 18 hours :0 I now plan (as finances allow) to fit these filters to all of my larger tanks as they are in my opinion the mutts nuts and i'd rather be safe than sorry
I also have a friend in the lfc who keeps Discus in a large tank filtered by a sand filter only with no other filters installed so as to get no build up of toxins in the filter media of a standard filter............he just simply syphons off any solid waste each week on a water change and has had no problems at all using this system
