Undergravel Filters are the best filters!

In every tank ive ever had, its been under gravel and a power head that i used. Ive never had a problem with their filtration or water movement. Also i think they are so unobtrusive compared to some of the huge box style filters you can buy, which means a lot less you need to hide :)
 
Anyone had any luck with running RFUGF's with sand instead of gravel? I just got a 25 Gal Eclipse Hood setup and was thinking of adding an old PH and UGF for overkill more than anything. I saw someone using pool filter sand and really liked the look but if it is going to fall down in the UGF I will have to go the gravel route instead.
 
I realize this thread hasn't been posted to for a few months but it caught my attention....just couldn't help myself. I'm getting back into the hobby after nearly 30 years...yep...I'm older than dirt.....of being away. All those years ago there weren't canisters (at least that I recall) or bio-wheels and most external filters were a mess to work with and even then didn't work all that well. I used UGF for all my tanks, had up to 10 running at the same time, though I'll admit the largest was 45 gallons and most were in the 10-20 gallon range. UGF's back then were the way to go and my tanks were gloriously crystal clear, like the best stream water you could find, and my fish thrived to the point where I was breeding and selling green lyre-tailed swords and dwarf gouramis to pet stores all over the Pacific Northwest. So now I'm back to fish, though on a much smaller scale, with a regular 55 gallon in our family room and a 37 gallon tall show in our office. Running Emperor 400 and 280....oh yeah...and I just couldn't totally get away from my sand filter so I hung a fluidized bed filter on the 55. :D So far so good......
 
ugf are ok..if it works for you then thats all that matters :)
i used to keep them back in the day and the only time i had problems is when i had live tubifex worms breed beneath the plate.
i cant keep ugf anymore cuz all my tanks have sand
i swear by the rena xp3
:hi:
 
Again contrary to common info on the web, RFUG can be run with sand, but not nearly so easily as you can run gravel. It is not off-the-shelf but requires DIY. The over-engineered variant of RFUG in the already cited article* has beed used by me for years with aragonite (much of which is quite small-grained) for BW puffers, just using two layers of fiberglass mesh screening atop the eggcrate (so is comparable to plenum construction in assembly but not comparable to plenum functionally or biologically). I used only the penguin 1140 powerheads to drive such and did not use deep sand layers - the back-pressure from too deep sand would kill the flow.

*http://www.thepufferforum.com/articles/water/ugfilters.html
 
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