Bought a week old Eheim, used in salt, for my fresh.. Need advice!

Hello again!

I purchased an Eheim 2215 today for 70$, it had been used for a week in a salt setup, the guy later decided to go with a sump and my buddy at the LFS let me know he had it in for relatively cheap. So the first thing I thought was... this is going to need to have it's media replaced and I need to run it for a bit to get some of the tubing cleaned, right? I wouldn't want any nasty bacteria that guy may have had in his tank, in mine.

What do you all suggest for media? I looked inside and I didn't recognize the coco puffs that were on the second level of filtration. What the heck are those things? Also, I have filter floss, and Bioballs... do I need anything else? These coco-puff wanna-be's are the chemical filtration I'm assuming? If it's not necessary to have that I'd rather just load the pump with a little floss and more bio balls.

Please advise!

Thanks!!

 

You could look up what the original media was and get replacements I wouldn't use coco puffs though

 

I guess my question was more do I have to get those or would filter floss and bio balls be sufficient?

 

I'm not sure sorry hopefully someone has used the filter will add

 

Hello, I have a 2217. The cocoa puff looking things are the eheim bio media.

 

So it should be fine for me to sub those and the bioballs then? What about the things that look like super small diameter pvc? IS that just more Biomedia?

Bottom line, would bio balls and Mechanical filtration work?

Thanks for helping LexI

 

The small tubes are mechanical filtration. You can substitute any brand you want.

 

The following should help:

In the Eheims, they use a pre-filter of ceramic rings (small tubes), followed by a coarse sponge (blue), followed by Substrat (coco puffs) or Substrat Pro (more like crushed rocks) as their bio media, followed by a water polishing pad (white), followed by a carbon pad (if you choose to use).

To ready it for Freshwater from SW, I would fill a bucket with warm water and vinegar, run the canister on the bucket for an hour or so, then empty the bucket, fill with warm water only, and run canister for another hour. This should get any salt traces out of all the nooks and crannies.

If you want to use all original Eheim media, have a look around as they do sell media kits for the Classics. These kits contain everything that comes with the filter.

The advantage of a canister is that you can put any media you like in them. Your intended media stocking is fine

I would definitely recommend using their media basket, it makes so much easier when it comes time to clean the canister.

 

Perfect! that's the exact information I was looking for Ryan! I'll get started on cycling it with water/vinegar right away!

Thanks again!

 

Wait a second, you don't cycle it with vinegar. I meant you run it with a bucket of water to clean the canister, then flush with fresh water, before putting it on your display tank.

 

lol ok, soooo now that it's run with vinegar how long should I wait?

To clarify, I ran it into a bucket, not my tank, with some vinegar and warm water. I just flushed it out a few times with warm water and started it up again. I'll assume I just run it for an hour or so and then do a water change and add some de-chlorinater and run it on the tank?