How to get crystal clear water?

During my tank maintenance today, I cleaned the impellers and housings for my powerheads and most of the bubbles dissapeared. Don't get it, because the flow was great and hasn't changed. Guess some crud was causing cavitation. Cleaned the Filstar impellar as well as the rest of it. No change there. Spits out a blast of supper fine bubbles about every half hour. Also ordered a Filter Max III with replacement sponges to run on the powerheads. In the interim, I installed a prefilter on my canister intake - same as the ones I'm running on my powerheads. Usually, I clean my canister every week. I'm going to try every other week and see if that doesn't help the thing settle down. Maybe I'm disturbing it too much, getting air inside the bio-media, disturbing some of the muck that could be used as a type of seal between baskets...we'll see. Thanks for the input RTR and everyone else as well.

ps. Everytime I see RTR, I think "ready-to-run" from Radio Controlled modeling. Ever heard that before?
 
I have a Filstar XP2 on my 55. I have the sponges that came with it in the bottom, and some of the biostars in the second basket, and then I put polyester fiberfill..all that I could cram in, in the rest of the second basket. I've been pretty happy with that. I toss the fiberfill and replace. You can't clean the stuff. I rely on the sponges and the biostars to retain nitrifying bacteria. The only time I have bubble issues is when I do my weekly water changes. I don't shut off my filter, and have a waterfall effect from the return until the water gets back up to the level of the spraybar.
After I clean my filter, which is every 2 to 3 weeks, I may be going on 4 right now..I do my best to make sure I have all air out of the system. I prefil the filter with water at the sink when done with treated water, and after I get it hooked back up I move it around to be sure all air is out. I use a flashlight to check..kinda dark in the cabinet. I don't have the light you do over the tank, but I don't notice bubbles like you are saying you see.
As far as frequency of filter cleaning...one thing they tell you with pool filters is that you need some crud in your filter for the other crud to stick to, so I look at water clarity and if the strength of water return is down in helping to decide when to clean my filter.
 
Stinking bubbles are back in full force today. Pretty sure majority of them are coming from the powerheads. I'm about read to change them out. Might order a couple of the the Eheim Aquaballs with internal filter attachments and see how they work. I'm sick of s**** equipement and thinking I might change everything over to Eheim based on their rep. with current users and my ongoing problems even though I'm doing everything the best I know how to do.
 
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