Helping A Friend

[tez2k007]

My friend has just bought a fish tank, 100l. I said I would help him out by giving some mature media. I have his filter foam pads and figured I could just add them to my filter. Will this work and how long would I need to leave them in?

 

[zoetetra]

could you not give him a bit of your media.
you could put the pads in your filter but i would leave them in there for a few weeks, and that would give your friend chance to look around and check out what is going to go in the tank

 

[craig855s]

I'd just give him a couple of cubic inches of ur foam in exchange for a couple of cubic inches of his brand new foam (so u dont end up with a half empty filter)

 

[waterdrop]

As long as you don't donate more than 1/3 of the volume of your biomedia (foam), your existing filter should be fine. Sometimes you have to be creative about cutting up sponges and redoing things in both filters but it all usually works out fine.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

If there is no compatibility between your new filter and the one you have to work with, go clean your filter in the new tank. I mean really clean it in there, not a casual one time squeeze, and treat his filter as if it was being fishless cycled using one of the bacteria booster products. I find that I can usually, not always, get a fully cycled filter that way in a week or less.