Reverse Osmosis Aquarium Filter
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Aquarium filters will normally take out all the waste of your fishes and chemical contaminants. But by using reverse osmosis Aquarium Filter, your water will be 90-99% pure before it even reaches our Aquarium Tank.
So how does it help your aquarium setup?
When your water goes through the reverse osmosis Aqurium Filter, your Aquarium should have minimal algae growth, a steady pH level, and low phosphate and nitrate levels. So you are getting rid of excess algae nutrients that could lead to aggressive growth of algae in your tank. Without these unsightly algae growth, your tank will be crystal clear from the sparkling water.
Reverse Osmosis Aquarium Filter is especially helpful if your tap water is very high in heavy metals like cadmium and nickel or if you use well water that have loads of minerals like limestone causing it to be “hard”. Its removes all these impurities by forcing the water through a semi-permeable membrane.
A word of caution if you are building a fresh water Aquarium setup. As Reverse osmosis filtration removes practically everything from the water, even the nutrients for your aquatic plants and fishes will be removed. So you will have to add back the essential minerals by using a marine salt mix.
Now to check if your water is really of reverse osmosis quality, you have to test your water with a conductivity meter or TDS meter. Purified water will have a general hardness of 0 GH and alkalinity of 0 dKH.
The maintenance of a Reverse Osmosis Aquarium Filter is very minimal. Just make sure before you start using the aquarium filter, flush your whole aquarium setup with clean water. This will enhance the life span of the semi-permeable membrane within the Reverse Osmosis Aquarium Filter. Another tip is not to use hot water to run through the aquarium filter. As the semi-permeable membrane is very fragile, using hot water can damages the membrane.
Start using Reverse Osmosis Aquarium Filter and let your fishes have sparkling water that you can drink.
Diatom Aquarium Filter
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Diatom Aquarium Filter is an organic Aqurium Filter that can clean and polish your aquarium tank so well you thought you never need to change water again.
First, let’s explain what are Diatom. They are single cell algae organisms that serves as food for fish as small as guppy and as large as a whale. When Diatom die, they leave a fossil which will sink to the bottom of the sea bed. These silica-like skeletons will form part of the diatomaceous earth. These silica-like skeletons of Diatom are full of tiny holes in a mesh-like structure. Now you can see from the small holes and inter-mesh like structure, why they are excellent to be used as an Aquarium Filter.
Using a Diatom Aquaium Filter will improve the healing of your fishes and aquarium plants. But most importantly, as I mentioned, your aquarium tank water will be very very clear. No more murky and dirty waters. Their excellent cleaning and filtering power come from a efficient pore structure that will trap debris as small as 1 micron.
So what are the Disadvantages of a Diatom Aquarium Filter?
Well with this superb cleaning power, it comes with a price. When your Diatom Aquarium Filters are run continuously, it gets full very fast. So you might have to clean and replenish regularly.
So I would suggest you give them a shift work schedule (8 Hr shift or 12 Hr shift) or only use them when you have a tough problem with feisty algae accumulation. Another recommendation is to use these Aquariium Filters when you need to polish water in anticipation of house guest.
As for the setup, pairing the Diatom Aquarium Filter with any Biological Aquarium Filters like BioWheel is a match made in heaven. They each have their advantages and complement each other perfectly. Especially in a DIY Aquarium Filter setup.
If you want crystal clear water in your Aquarium tank, use a Diatom Aquarium Filter.
Protein Skimmer Aquarium Filter
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One of the best mechanical aquarium filter methods around is the protein skimming method, also know as foam fractionation. Ammonia and nitrile compounds are extremely toxic to fish in the aquarium tank and protein skimming is used to prevent them. This type of aquarium filter will produce bubbles that create a foam where organic compound are trapped and remove into the collection cup. Being the only type of filter that will physically remove organic compound from the aquarium water, protein skimming is an important part of a salt water aquarium. To buy a protein skimming aquarium filter, it is recommended to buy a larger one as it is easier to underskim than overskim.
Types of Aquarium Protein Skimmers
Downdraft Protein Skimmers
Uses a motor to create a high pressured water stream that will be forced into a column. Within the column, there will be small little balls to convert the air in the water into small bubbles. The bubbles will then be released back into the aquarium tank.
Venturi Protein Skimmers
Create a mixture of tiny bubbles and water via the use of a venturi valve, hence the name. This type of aquarium filter will sometimes spin up a vortex to increase contact interval between bubbles and water. Without a column like the Downdraft model, venturi protein skimmer are small and can be hidden under the tank.
Counter Current Protein Skimmers
Counter current protein skimmers also know as air driven protein skimmers use airstone to produces small bubbles and water mix. The airstone are mostly made of wood or glass. This type of aquarium filter are quite maintenence intensive as you need to replace the airstone regularly. It is also a dual pump system that uses a air pump to drive the air stone and a water pump to drive the water through the protein skimmer.
Needle Wheel Protein Skimmers
As the name suggests, this type of aquarium filter uses a needle wheel to slice and dice the water into a mixture of fine bubbles and water. This will create a pseudo vortex a la Venturi Protein Skimmers that will maximise the time between the bubbles and water. A specialised pump is needed in this type of aquarium filter.
Which do you prefer?
Wet/dry Aquarium Filter
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In the last article I mentioned that the biowheel aquarium filter is also known as a wet/dry aquarium filter which is also known as a trickle aquarium filter. That is a bit wrong but they both provide the same service. A wet/dry aquarium filter provides mechanical, biological and sometimes chemical filtration for an aquarium. There are a lot of people who like wet/dry aquarium filter because of the useful sump within the filter.
How a wet/dry aquarium filter can help you
A wet/dry aquarium filter will be installed under the tank, but inside the aquarium rack. It is basically a recycling plant for the main aquarium tank. The water is extracted from the aquarium tank and placed in a large rectangle containment. The water will first go through a mechanical aquarium filter like a synthetic foam to take up the solid materials. It will then go through activated carbon/charcoal to adsorb chemical waste. Next it will then fall like a waterfall to a drip dish to gain maximum oxygen to a biological aquarium filter below. The biological aquarium filter will have all the friendly bacterial that will work hard to break down all the waste from your fish. Now that all the water is “clean”, it will go into a sump and then pump back to the aquarium at the same rate as the wet/dry aquarium filter. This will regulate the level of the sump.
As you can see, this is the sort of three-in-one solution for your aquarium filter that you can buy. But there are also hobbyist who like to do their own small wet dry aquarium filters themselves. The DIY style.
There are several advantages for building your own wet dry aquarium filters and one of them is you can buy a large sump for it. Why do you want to have a large sump? With the large surface area, you can take in and hold more oxygen within the aquarium filter. And with more oxygen in your biological aquarium filter, your bacteria will work in full effectiveness. So if you have a lot of fishes in your aquarium, this DIY aquarium filter will be excellent for you.
Biological Aquarium Filter
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As I mentioned in Aquarium Filter - The Basics, biological Aquarium filters make use of friendly bacteria to break down fish waste and ammonia to keep the aquarium clean. They are generally devices that provide living space for the beneficial bacteria.
The bottleneck for most biological filters are the amount of oxygen (O2) available within water in the aquarium tank. The bad thing is oxygen is not very soluble in water. As a matter of fact, the amount of oxygen in aquarium water rarely goes up to more than 7 parts per million (ppm). Imagine for every 1 million units of water particles, there are less than 7 units of oxygen. So there are plenty of competetion within the aquarium tank.
So within the biological aquarium filters, the bacteria needs the oxygen to survive. An with such small amount of oxygen, there is nver enough.
If you are under-gravel aquarium filters, canister aquarium filters, sponge aquarium filters, and especially fluidised bed aquarium filters, there will always be a lack of oxygen. You can buy the largest capacity aquarium filter with large surface area housing plenty of bacteria serving all your fish waste, but the water in these aquarium filters just do not have enough oxygen for the bacteria.
All of these types of aquarium filters are greatly limited by the miniscule amount of oxygen in the water that flows through them.
Introducing BIO-Wheels
So that best solution would be a bio wheel aquarium filter, also sometimes called a small wet dry aquarium filters. These aquarium filter are wheels that have half their body spin above in the air and the other half in the aquarium water. So the air in the aquarium filter will always be chocked full of oxygen. Actually, 200,00 ppm in total. That’s 28,000 times more than a regular above mentioned aquariun filter. As the oxygen will always be replenished as the wheel turn, within the biowheel aqurium filter, it will always be full of oxygen. And that’s happy news for your bacteria.
What this translate to is that your bacteria in the aquarium filter will work at full capacity to rapidly breaking down the fish waste. And that’s good news to you.
Aquarium Filter - The Basics
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An aquarium filter is important to your aquarium setup because for your fish to be happy, the water quality had to be high. I know purist will say that having aquatic plants and those sucker fish is enough to clean up the fish environment. This can be true if you only have a few fishes in your aquarium, but once your population of fish exploded, an aquariumfilter is essential for enhanced bio-loading.
Aquarium filters works in a variety of ways, but there are mostly three types of filtration. Mechanical, Chemical and Biological Filtration.
Mechanical Aquarium Filter
Imagine a sieve that you use to separate out the solid rubbish from your liquid rubbish. That’s how a mechanical aquariium filter works. This type of aquqarium filter is mostly used to filter out things like uneaten fish food, excretions, plant or algal debris.
Some of the material used for a mechanical aquarium filter include sponges, polyester fiber, synthetic foams or filter wool made of polyethylene terephthalate or nylon.
Once the solids particles are trapped within the aquarium filters, the pore size of the sieve will get smaller and smaller. This will affect the flowrate of the water within the aquarium. For maximun efficiency and not overloading the power pump, you have to change the mechanical aquariumfilters once they are clogged.
Chemical Aquarium Filter
Other than solid waste, there are also chemical waste in the aquarium environment. Some common chemical waste included toxins from the fish waste, medications for the fishes, heavy metal in the water and chlorine found in tap water.
The most common material for chemcial aquarium filter is activated charcoal or carbon. As the aquarium water pass through it, the activated carbon will absorb the chemicals and hold them until you removed the carbon. They are not reusable and must be changed frequently.
Biological Aquarium Filter
Like your intestine that will break down the food you eat with friendly bacteria, biological aquarium filters work the sam way. The filter will consist of a medium that will house friendly bacteria that can break down the bio waste excreted by the fish.
A common toxic biological waste is ammonia. the bacteria will break it down into nitrite and then into nitrate. The nitrate will then be used by the aquatic plants as chemical fertilizers.
Sometimes aquarium filters can serve dual mode whereby a mechnical filter can contain bacteria inside to do the biological filter part.
These are the basics of Aquarium filter. There will be more articles. Stay tuned.
