how much bacteria is really in the water?

kooter

kooter

AquaMan
Dec 14, 2003
701
13
18
Mission, BC
ok., I have heard/read that you should rinse your filter media in tank water.
Why? When you do a cycle on another tank, the water from a previous cycled tank doesn't house any bacteria to cycle the new tank. soooo....what beneficial factors justify rinsing in tank water when you can rinse it with fresh clean water? Just wondering........it has always puzzled me.
 
The old tank water is just handy. Obviously, you don’t want to rinse it in water straight from the tap if it has chlorines or chloramines, it might harm the bacteria on the filter. But there is nothing wrong with using fresh treated water.
 
using your tank water is safer because as pointed out, tap water has chlorines, chloramines and other heavy metals and a temperature difference. this would have an adverse affect on the bacteria thats already established on the filter pad, which you want to keep for an effective biological filter. all you want to do is remove the crud and debris from the filter pad to make mechanical filtration more effecient. obviously it won't harm your overall cycle in an established tank, but its just a simple task you should perform.
 
Yes, what everyone else said.

Once in a great while I will use hot tap water to clean certain filter surfaces and media. But I do this on a rotating system and only when completely necessary to remove serious crud and slime. One must be careful to always keep some "dirty" media in the filter to ensure there is always adequate biofiltration.

This is why things like lava rocks, ceramic rings, biowheels and stars are so cool. You can always be sure there is some good bacteria present even if you entirely clean or replace all of the other media.
 
thanks everyone! I clean the media with tap water, but I make sure it is roughly the same temp. and after the cleaning when I fill the filter with water I put in a water treatment to rid any chlorine,chloramine and heavy metals. :)
 
If your rinsing the filter material with tap water you might kill the bacteria rather quickly with the chlorine, even if you are adding treatment to it later, the damage could already be done. This is only my assumption, any else verify this?

If you need to clean your filter material and its either really dirty or your lazy (both which would describe me lol) then if you have 2 filters going you can thoroughly rinse 1 without too much worry about killing off the bacteria since your other will still be working - as long as both filters are about equal capacity. Thats one nice thing about having dual filters. If you have seperate bio media and filter pads, you can similarly rinse the pads really good in tap water but dont rinse the bio media - just let it be if its not too bad. The filter pads may have some bacteria in them but if you have a good volume of bio media it shouldnt be a big deal rinsing just the mechincal filter pads. There is also bacteria on most surfaces in your tank - mostly in the gravel. if you have a bare-bottom tank I suppose there is a lot higher demand on the bacteria in the filter in which case you have to be more carefull.
 
I have 4 filter pads in my Penguin 350's. Rinse two of the filters off in hot water every so often, swap positions of said filters so I know which one is next. One's in the rear get the dirtiest.

With the Bio-Wheels, don't worry about loosing too many bacteria's...
 
aardvark1 said:
I have 4 filter pads in my Penguin 350's. Rinse two of the filters off in hot water every so often, swap positions of said filters so I know which one is next. One's in the rear get the dirtiest.

With the Bio-Wheels, don't worry about loosing too many bacteria's...
Click to expand...

Not true^^ my tank went through an entire recylcing for a week when I removed the carbon in my 2 biowheel 350s and replaced them with just plain filter floss. Now I don't have to rinse the filters because I just cut new ones because 8 square feet of floss for 3 bucks is NICE!
 
Yep-but I'm, running double the filter pads; 4 of them instead of 2.

Still have 2 "dirty" pads when I clean the other 2.

I just left the charcoal in them, don't bother anything...
 
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