Help With A Used 75 Gallon Fresh Water Tank

[kvnkne]

Hey people I was hoping to get some help// I recently came into a used 75 gallon fresh water tank. After visiting my local petsmart and upon inspection of their fish people, they told me to take everything apart and clean thourougly. The tank is custom built with a wet/dry sump filter. I have not replaced any of the components but tried to clean the best that I could. The filter is by the name of Reef/Lake systems out of Virginia. Cant find anything out about that. I cleaned and put everything back together, filled the tank and have been running it for 2 days now. The water is very cloudy, I have not done ph, or any tests because of the water being so. I was hoping for a little information on how to go about assesing the situation. I would like to replace the custom filter inside the tank, and get new boi balls and a sponge. Help if you can

Thanks

 

[waterdrop]

You're aware that a large tank like that may be somewhat expensive to re-equip? If it were me I'd probably plan a period (that might take a while) of talking with the members in the hardware section and elsewhere to plan out a new filtration system (or the re-use of the current one) and a re-check of the heaters and lighting, etc. If you are patient enough to work on these things, its usually better to feel they've been settled before you set out to do the fishless cycle to get a working biofilter.

I believe many members that run duel external cannister filters on a volume that size. Dual filters carry the advantage of alternate cleaning schedules and of course redundancy in case of mechanical failure. Its also a good deal easier to to simply acquire them, rather than needing to become educated about filter design and so forth, with a custom filter system. Often 2 heaters are needed. Inline heaters can be spliced in to the output tubes of the external cannisters.

Of course, all equipment to some extent begs the question of your plans and goals. Capacities needed can be dependent on these goals sometimes.

Filters typically are designed to handle mechanical filtration, chemical filtration and biological filtration. Different media types and coarseness levels are perferred for different functions. If you're not yet familiar with these functions, that would be a good search project. If you did an advanced search on my ID with "mechanical filtration" or something specific like that it might turn up some of my longer yakking about the filtration topic and ultimately there are experienced members in hardware,etc. who know it better than me.

Good luck!
~~waterdrop~~