kra-z-fishmumm

I have been think of taking out the UGF in my 55g. I have two HOB filters. One is an old Whisper Secondnature(it came with the set up) and a second one, a Penguin for 30g. Would these be enough to take care of filtration? What else might I have to do to keep the fish happy and healthy. Thanks for any input.

susitna-flower

One of the things I heard someone suggest the other day which I have actually done on my shrimp tank.

Stick the tube of the HOB filter inside the up tube of the UGF....I plugged the extra space with fiber filter material.

This improves the up pull on the UGF, and makes it much more effecient!

Now I am one of those "OLD SCHOOL", who likes the UGF....some people here don't like them at all...I feel they increase the bacteria available to complete the nitrogen cycle. One thing I do is to use a really long stick to stur the gravel once a week when I am vacuuming, and use other filters on each tank also.....

My 125 has a Eheim 2028 canister filter in addition to the UGF & power head.

One 55 has an UGF and one powerhead, and one HOB filter. The CRS 55 has an UGF, one large HOB filter and a HOB hooked up to the UGF!...... I believe in over kill, and under stocking.

Today when I did water changes, and testing all tanks had 0 ammonia, nitrites and under 10 on nitrates BEFORE changing 50% in each....

Blub

COBettaCouple

You would want your 2 HOBs to total at least 550 gph in flow rate.

Gargoyle

Yeup HOB on the uptake tube works very well...

Tavel

didn't you say it was difficult to set up and didn't work that well anyway? I pay attention, hahaha.

I would remove the UGF because it's one of those outdated "old school" things, though you'll never get the old timers to admit it!

I am in the opinion that they don't do any real harm (with a powerhead), but on the flip side don't really do any good either. they just make maintenance harder and put more clutter in the tank.

Newer filters have adequate aeration capabilities and effective accommodation for bacteria...which are the only two things a UGF does.

The two filters would be just fine in tandem. I might look into optimizing biological filtration on that whisper (whispers are terrible for bio-filtering..i guess they're old school too!). I like to get the bio filter packs for acuaclears and cram them in behind the filter floss. It really helps a lot.


My personal recommendation if you want get NEW filters is Aquaclear. I love the filter box, the sponge is reusable and you can put a lot of bio media in there. The aerate most effectively of any HOB i've used. And finally, aquaclear has an ingenious design that re filters water when you turn the flow rate down (Ingenious because it's so simple, but so effective). The water gets filtered 3-4 times before output, so you don't lose effectiveness when you turn the flow rate down.

Gargoyle

No it wasn't difficult.. Just took a little thought..

I did say that it wasn't my favorite choice of filtration setups. As far as working it did and does pull junk into the gravel but not into the filter very well like I had originally expected. The tank does have a pretty fine gravel in it though. Perhaps a larger gravel would work better.

fishgirl

I'm not an Old Timer, the reason I like the UGF is that it allows for A LOT more bacteria to complete the nitrogen cycle. I find that my plants and fish do very well with UGF and HOB.

Tavel

the bacteria colony will only be the exact size it needs to be. There won't be more bacteria just because there's more space, it will match the carrying capacity of the tank. ("cycling" is really a function of 'carrying capacity'. The same thing happens with rabbits in a field or with plants in the dessert).

HOB filters offer the bacteria far better resource density than UGF. so they need less space, and that's really where they want be because of that.

I actually run two of my tanks with no gravel at all, a goldfish tank and a hospital tank, because I need to be able to clean those easily.

I could see myself thinking the same thing and then being really disappointed when it didn't work right. haha