Biological filter media..Whats the best out there?...

[pixl8r]

what about steel wool, like the kind used for cleaning dishes????

Are you serious, or just kidding? The metal would rust and would add high levels of iron to your tank.

As a tangent, I use those tubes as a substrate (with gravel or sand) in my tanks that I use for my baby shrimp. It's just yet another hiding and foraging place for them.

 

[Rbishop]

No, do not use steel wool.

 

[DarkSoul]

the big difference between Ehfisubstrat Pro and Ehfisubstrat is that Pro is better engineered for flow, and resembles a chocolatey cereal that my daughter loves, and now i have to be careful i dont leave any out. im not speaking from experience or anything though.

When I bought my second eheim 2213, it came with the substrat pro..... and I was half-tempted to put it into a bowl with some milk and chow down.

Instead what I ended up doing was mixing the 2 types in a big bowl, and divided them up equally between the 2 filters.... so there is a big layer in my filters with substrat/Pro mix.



I still wanna have a bowl of them though.

 

[el wadd]

they look much better than they taste.

 

[Shocker6966]

http://www.wernersponds.com/biofiltermedia.htm

Bang for buck goes to the potscrubbers for conventional filters. Sand obviously if you use a fluidized bed filter.

 

[Squawkbert]

I ordered the Ehfisubstrat Pro. We'll see how it shakes out.

^ I have that (Cocoa puffs) and the rings that came w/ my 2215 kit. Once the media all packed itself down a bit, I added 2 pot scrubbers to the bottom of the can while doing my 1st "real" cleaning of it (which means I emptied ea. layer into its own bucket, rinsed w/ tank water. returned to canister).

If you want lots of SA for bacterial growth, mylon spot scrubbers are hard to beat - impossible to beat if you factor cost in.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

I have tried a number of things and always have come back to the dsimple sponge. They are excellent for both bio and mech, are cleanable and reusable for many many years and cheap- plus they can be cut to shape.

Most of the so called "fancy" bio media eventually clog and will need to be replaced.

And floss is not a good bio media. it is designed to trap solid wastes which means reduced flow and surface area. I routinely use floss in all my filters- both HOB and canister. In the HOBs I replace it weekly.

 

[Hartzell]

Nylon Pot Scrubbies

I believe I saw a comparative chart in MonsterFishKeepers that says nylon pot scrubbies (they look like steel wool made of nylon) have the greatest surface area for bacteria to colonize, hundreds of times greater than Bio balls or Bio cubes. And they're very cheap.

 

[loaches r cool]

I've used quite a few, and from now on sticking with pot scrubbers for anything new.

 

[DeeDeeK]

contrast and compare?

Does anybody know of any site with solid info on any products, like useful surface area per volume of media, pore size, structure, composition, etc?

I'd like to see, say, ten identical 10gal tanks with equal amounts of identical substrate, identical filters, and each with an equal volume of bio-media of different sorts. Then run a fishless cycle on all of them. Naturally the tanks would be filled and kept topped-off to a single water level.

We could see how quickly the biological filter establishes itself. Then we could keep increasing the measured amount of ammonia added gradually in order to simulate the ammonia production of greater and greater biological loads. Finally, we could monitor nitrates and determine whether and how much nitrate reduction is happening.

I really want to know the solid facts about these things. Right now I wonder how much snake-oil I'm being sold and how much misinformation there is intentionally and unintentionally being put out there. I know I misinform my share of people with my superstitious opinions about the hobby day by day.

I use a plastic cylinder (tennis ball can) with a weak little powerhead attached to the bottom. I put some polyester pillow stuffing in the bottom and fill the cylinder to the top with Odyssea "Bio-Glass" media and the powerhead pushes water slowly up through it all. It handles a rather large biological load with aplomb, but I'd like to know more facts about what I'm doing. Is the Odyssea product decent as far as sintered glass goes? Is it a good media to facilitate nitrate reduction? If I replaced it with substrate pro, could I keep an even denser little nano-ecosystem, with more crustaceans and worms and snails to be live-in entertainers and food for my fish?

I just drank a Rockstar before I typed all this, so please forgive this chatty Kathy.