How Long Before My Filter Colonizes After A Cleaning?

[Evad]

Hi. I have an established tank with two large cannisters running for the last few months. Its time to clean them out and so I cleaned one out today.

The question: How long until the newly cleaned filter is recharged with all the good bacteria stuff so that I can change my other filter? I am hoping the answer is a matter of a couple of days

 

[Tolak]

If you rinse the filter media with old tank or other dechlorinated water it will not harm your nitrifying bacteria.

 

[Evad]

My water is not dechlorinated but not sure how you would classify "rinse". I take the ceramic rings and the other ceramic porus thingies and rinse them clean - usually about two minutes of running it under water at roughly the same temp as the tank water. I actually REPLACE the floss filter media so I know that has to start over from scratch but it sounds like the lower half of my cannister filter might be still full of bacteria?

 

[Tolak]

If you are in Seattle your tap water has chlorine & chloramine. These are disinfectants, used to kill bacteria. If you used straight tap water to rinse the filter media you have severely damaged, if not killed off the nitrifying bacteria. This means you will have to cycle in the filter again, this will take 3-4 weeks.

 

[Evad]

Thanks for being so observant, but I live on well water and so we don't have any chemicals in our water.

I would be interested to understand why it only takes 4-6 weeks to cycle my tank from zero, but then it would take 3-4 weeks to have a cannister filter become "stocked" with nitrifying bacteria again? Please realize I have two cannister filters so they other one is still fully cycled. The bacteria is already present in the tank so isn't it just a matter of the bacteria making their home inside the clean filter?

I remember back when I used to overstock my tank with angelfish that I changed each filter every month. No imbalance or spikes occured. Now you are telling me that my cannister isn't even processing bacteria for 3-4 weeks? Sorry if I am reading this wrong...

 

[rabbut]

If you are using well water, probibly upto 2 weeks, depending on how vigorously you cleaned the media, and the matureness of the filter. A light cleaning of an imature filter can be recovered from in a few hours most, a thourough clean of an imature filter takes upto 2 weeks to recover. A mature (6month or more old) filter won't be damages by a light clean and may tank a few hours to recover after a very vigorous clean

I usualy advise using tank water, but well water I belive is safe for filter cleans

If all the filter bacteia in that canistor was killed, that canistor would need to completely re-cycle. Yes teh bacteria would be in the tank, but they would all be in the other canistor. It takes a long time (sometimes more than 8 weeks) for that bacteria to become sufficiently shared between the two filters again.

HTH
Rabbut

 

[Evad]

If you are using well water, probibly upto 2 weeks, depending on how vigorously you cleaned the media, and the matureness of the filter. A light cleaning of an imature filter can be recovered from in a few hours most, a thourough clean of an imature filter takes upto 2 weeks to recover. A mature (6month or more old) filter won't be damages by a light clean and may tank a few hours to recover after a very vigorous clean

I usualy advise using tank water, but well water I belive is safe for filter cleans

If all the filter bacteia in that canistor was killed, that canistor would need to completely re-cycle. Yes teh bacteria would be in the tank, but they would all be in the other canistor. It takes a long time (sometimes more than 8 weeks) for that bacteria to become sufficiently shared between the two filters again.

HTH
Rabbut

Fascinating. I wonder what was happening in my last tank where I changed each filter every other month? If the filter only goes undisturbed for 8 weeks does that mean only one filter was actually doing biological filtering at any given time and the other one was simply mechanical? Hmmm

Do most people change their filters less often than every 8 weeks?

Good discussiont thank you!