Recommended filtration for discus.

I have a standard Boyu ea-150 aquarium. It has a volume of 472 liters and comes standard with an overhead filter, which sprays water over a media filled trough above the water surface, with a 1500 l/hr pump.

My concern is that this is inadequate turnover and inadequate volume of media (space for about 5liters of ceramic noodles.) My other concern is that 2 hours of power cuts will dry put the media too much and also that bacteria will die off due to cold in winter.

The 3 questions are, should I discard this filtration altogether and replace with a canister? Could the standard overhead filtration be adequate with the heavy water change regime required for discus? Or should I keep the overhead filtration and support it with some other form of filtration?

I am not going for a sump filter due to noise and power consumption.

 

@Broder, they are inefficient to the point of doing nothing. I have 3 tanks with these systems, when I used them, for some reason I got worms living in there, I ripped them all out and use canisters, you'll probably want two canisters along the line of Tetratec ex 1200's in there

 

I use to have a tank with that exact filtration that worked beautifully. The tank even housed discus at a time. I will add to the filtration rather then removing it. Great for adding oxygen to the water and useful when run with a battery pump during power outages when those canisters won't run.

 

Thanks Jwh. Yeah.. I suspected that those overhead filters wouldn't amount to much. Thanks for the confirmation.

I want to keep the amount of cleaning work to a minimum(in discus terms anyway), so would rather just clean one pre-filter at waterchange times. Would rather just have one canister. Are there any affordable ones out there? The tank is only 472 liters and I'll only keep about 7 discus, maybe a few tetras etc.

 

Thanks Vis. Good to have both sides of the coin here. I wonder what you and Jwh were doing differently to make his inefficient? I must say, I'd rather use what I have already if it does work.

 

I would toss 5 litres of matrix or siporex in the overhead filter and use it like its intended. Wet dry filters are actually the way to go with discus and power outages. Trust me, I run my big rigs using wet-dry filters. As it goes, you probably wont get more than 5 litres of media in an average canister anyway. You could always opt for using both...........

Andrew

 

That's brilliant news Phish-man. I'll see how much media I can get into the trough and gauge from there if I want to add a canister filter. (I think I may be overestimating the 5liters that i said I could cram in there.)

What would I do for pre-filtering(removing solid waste) if I only use the overhead filter? It would seem a waste to incorporate a canister just for this?

 

You can pop a sponge on the inlet, but just watch it as it may block quite quickly

 

Cool! I love keeping it simple.

 

Approximately 50litresof ceramic rings in my home-made trickle filter

 

@pHish_man What you show is not even closely comparable to what you get in as the standard "in-the-canopy" type of filter you get in a Boyu tank. Your filter area is huge compared to the standard Boyu type filters, and I'm sure your filter will be efficient. My experience with the build-in-canopy filter has not been great, I have a 1m, 1,2m and a 2m Boyu or similar tanks, on all of them I went to canisters with significant improvement in visible water clarity

 

My existing tank actually runs very similar to that.

Looking at your filter, it appears to be quite a slow water turnover? Does this trickle filter lose a lot of heat?

 

@Jwh

yes, the photo of my filter is to illustrate using a trickle filter not being problematic with power outages. We must also remember that matrix and siporex offer far more surface area for biological action than my ceramic rings.

 

Hi, I bought a SunSun 280 liter tank a few weeks ago. It has the same wet/dry filter system as the Boyu.

At the moment it seems to be doing a great job with filtering biologically with only half of the trough filled with media (ceramic balls). I have the tank stock close to its max capacity and with the aquasoil leeching amonia, its I have no issues for now.

The plan is to get an canister filter and put some mechanical filtration media in it. The wet/dry filter makes it difficult to pre-filter the water mechanically due to shallowness of the trough.

 

And that's exactly where I believe the problem lies, the lack of depth, the water has very little "dwell" time on the filter media because of the lack of depth of the media, in the trickle filter in the photo above it is apparent that there will be much more time for the contaminants in the water to feed the bacteria on the media. A canister filter compensates will higher flow thus more passes over the media.
All being said and done, at the end of the day, if your water parameters are spot on, your filter works, irrespective of other people's preferences.

 

Lets face it, when it comes to a discus tank, running a sump and trickle filter is first choice, but Broder seems to need to make do with what he has, hence the recommendation of using his top filter in conjunction with a canister. And not to discount the top filter completely.

As for contact time of water over media in my trickle filter, I regulate that by my specific calculated flow rate. And not by the height of the media in the chamber. I run another discus tank where the trickle filter is a meat tray where the media is not stacked anywhere near as high. But my flow rate is the same ratio.

 

You make a very good point there Jwh. From a logical point of view, these overhead filters shouldn't work well at all?

Pros of overhead filter:
1. Good oxygenation.
2. Economy of space and aesthetics.

Cons of overhead filter:
1. Dries out during Eskom's lifestyle manipulation.
2. Cools down rapidly in winter during said outages.
3. Short water contact time with media.
4. Limited space for media.

Looking at it like this, I'll definitely feel better with a backup canister. Damn... Just as I was getting happy about saving a buck to buy more fish.

 

Just a point there about the media 'drying' out. This is actually the advantage of a wet dry filter. If the media is submerged ( like in a sump or canister ), then there is no oxygen passing over the media if the power goes out. The aerobic bacteria start dying off very quickly and this leads to problems. At least with a wet dry filter, when the water stops flowing over the media, the aerobic bacteria are still exposed to O2 and do not die off.

 

Thanks pHish_man. I just hate the amount of space, noise and power consption that comes with the territory of sumps. Trying to economise on labour and power consumption, so that I don't have to give up other tanks to make way for the discus tank.

 

I hear you. So in that case, I would go for maximum amount of matrix or siporex in your top filter and run this in conjunction with a canister. The crux with those top filters is the quality of the media you chuck in there