over filtration in planted tank ????

[midcuk]

i have been hearing that you can over filter planted tanks, what is the problems arising from this (i presume the plants do not get enough food), anyway i have a 110 uk gal tank with an internal juwel jumbo filter and a small eheim ecco external filter the tank is heavily planted and heavily stocked (marginally overstocked but not by much) as such i was going to add another larger external filter (bilogical containing efi and ceramic rings etc)to cope with the bioload what will be the effects of this on the tank and plants ?. At the moment i am doing 50% water changes a week to keep the fish in tip top condition if i leave it for more than a fortnight then signs of poor water quality appear.

any advice as im a total spanner and just muddle through

cheers

chris

 

[Silly me]

I dont think you could over filter any tank, as long as you dont start adding charcoal and other chemicals to the filter, your fine, also to much of a current does help aswell, but if your plant are growing well there is no need to cut down on the filtering.

 

[Scougie]

I'm no expert on this but I was told by my LFS that if anything a heavily planted tank should have less filteration not more. The reason being that the plants feed on the nitrates and heavy filtertion removes them. As an example in his shop he is running a Juwel 400 that should have a 1000ltr an hour pump, he uses only 400ltrs an hour and the tank is stunning. His argument is that the plants take care of everything. Just an example but as I said I'm no expert just passing on what I heard!

 

[clutterydrawer]

how does filtration remove nitrates then? if that was true no one would have nitrate troubles....and we'd all just turn the filter up instead of doing water changes.

one problem with heavy filtration in a planted tank is that having a lot of surface agitation removes all the CO2 from the water.

 

[konrad05]

how does filtration remove nitrates then? if that was true no one would have nitrate troubles....and we'd all just turn the filter up instead of doing water changes.

one problem with heavy filtration in a planted tank is that having a lot of surface agitation removes all the CO2 from the water.

that and with higher filtration, the more water movement, which is not really good for establishing plants

 

[Lateral Line]

It is certainly true that most serious planted tank keepers use quite light filtration and a relatively low stocking level. If you are overstocked, then you really need to consider what you want from your tank. If the fish and plants are okay now, then why change the filtration?

If you want to go more seriously into planted tanks, then sooner or later you'll need to supplement with CO2 and in highly filtered tanks, that becomes very difficult because the amount of water movement you get allows the CO2 to come out of solution before the plants can use it.

At the same time, overstocked tanks with low filtration rates risk pollution of course, but also the low water movement may deplete the O2 levels, particulaly at night.