(rousing upbeat music)
- What's up, fish tank people?
Dustin's Fish Tanks bringing it to you, on a Sunday, baby.
How's everybody doing? I hope you're doing well.
In today's video,
we're gonna talk about aquarium filtration.
I'm gonna talk about mechanical filtration in your aquarium,
I'm gonna talk more heavily on biological filtration.
We're gonna skip chemical filtration.
I'm gonna show you a couple examples
of a couple of different types of filters
for the plain-Jane common-man Aquarius.
And I'm also gonna show you one, two,
three amazing fish rooms
and how they filter and do water changes in their aquariums.
Okay, well first I wanted to find some of the things
that an aquarium filter does.
First and foremost, an aquarium filter
will actually remove particulates
from the actual aquarium that you have
and house is it in the back in the mechanical
and other parts of the back part of the filtration.
Beyond that, an aquarium filter will also
do a nice job of stirring up your aquarium, if you will.
You want enough water flow
that it's able to move particles around
and not have any dead spots in your aquarium.
And just as an aside, those of you struggling with algae,
sometimes, in addition to too much light
and too much excess nutrients,
the lack of water flow is a problem
and can cause algae in your aquarium.
Everything can sit in one spot.
Sometimes you see this with anubias, anubias grows slowly.
It grows slowly, there's not enough water flow,
the algae will grow on top of the anubias.
Let's stick here with water flow for a second,
let's talk about gas exchange.
Let's go roll over to the trustee whiteboard
and do a little diagram how this is gonna go.
And one of the big benefits that I think is often
overlooked with most filtration,
and that is removal of debris and surface skim
on the top of your water.
And I learned this from my guy, Brian.
The first thing that this does for you
is it helps with gas exchange.
You want as much gas exchange,
gas surface turbulation leaving your water.
What else does having turbulence
at the surface of your water do?
I will tell you, and it involves something right here.
It involves lighting.
This, folks, is your purple 20-gallon-high.
You have a not-so-great light on top of it.
If you have cloudy or not-so-clear water
'cause of poor filtration,
your light can only get a little bit down,
leaving our beloved plants down here.
Those are what your plants look like.
Our beloved plants down below, deprived and lacking light.
Conversely, if you have a good well-filtered aquarium,
the light can get all the way down to our plants.
You see, good gas exchange at the surface of your aquarium
not only helps with good gas exchange,
but it also helps the light
penetrate deeper to the bottom of your aquarium.
We've talked about mechanical filtration.
Now it's time to talk about an overlooked thing,
let's talk about biological filtration.
I wanna show the stages of this.
This is the mechanical-stage filter pad for an AquaClear.
I think this is a 110.
It's the big brother of this
AquaClear little guy right here.
These come with a pouch like this.
You put this at the bottom.
So, the mechanical filtration starts at the bottom.
Obviously, the sponge is significantly smaller for this one.
But, that one only goes so far,
you have to have what filters do.
And this is the part where the rubber meets the road,
this separates the rookies from the pros,
it's when you get involved in the biological filtration.
You've seen bio-balls, you've seen
the little ceramic balls that come with your filter.
This is the part that takes time.
We shift from more of like a
air-filter-in-a-car-type mentality
to a mother-nature, flow-type mentality
where we're actually using beneficial bacteria
to filter in our aquariums.
Let me explain.
So I was trying to think of myself,
what's a unique way I can emphasize
the importance of beneficial bacteria in your filter.
And I figured I would start by saying,
everybody realizes that when you're a beginner
you add fish too quickly, you kill fish quickly
because there's not enough beneficial bacteria
in both your filter and in your substrate.
We're gonna talk about that more in a minute.
But I'm like, how can I highlight this for people
and show them the importance of a biological filter?
This, folks, is the biggest and best way
I can show that to you.
This is a six-foot-tall cylinder at the Newport Aquarium.
This is the bio chamber for the Mekong tank.
Think about this for a second.
I ripped that tank down to its bare bones,
scraped the bottom clean,
added dirt, did the whole aquascape.
Now, they were able to add fish very quickly to it
because this giant tower had 15-year-old bacteria in it.
I'm gonna say that again.
15-year-old beneficial bacteria in a huge bacteria chamber.
They were easily able to add both fish,
and of course we added plants, back to that,
because the bio load was huge and established.
Let me go on.
You've heard about people who hardly do
any water changes in their aquarium.
Folks, straight up, I think those type of people are crazy.
But, maybe they are on to something.
You've seen the old man that hardly ever
does water changes in his thing.
What's going on with that?
Maybe, just maybe, those aquariums are entirely balanced.
I've been to fish rooms, I'm gonna show you in a second
where their aquariums are entirely balanced.
And their beneficial bacteria load, more importantly,
is completely balanced.
So, maybe they don't have to do as much work
with the water changes because they have enough
of the nitrosomonas and nitrosospira bacteria
available in their aquarium, keeping everything balanced.
Let's stick with bacteria here for a second.
I wanna talk about bacteria.
Yes, bacteria lives in your filter.
This is a 20-high, say you're filtering it
with a little AquaClear hang-on-back filter or whatever.
Now notice, the filter itself is about this big,
but look at all of this surface area down here.
Look at the size difference between this right here
and your little bit of a filter right here.
It's my wonderful handwriting.
Your filter right here.
The size, I don't care if you have an oversized.
Let's say you have two of 'em.
You still have much more surface area
down here with the beneficial bacteria.
I talk about it on webinars, I'm talking about it again.
The substrate is the most overlooked
part of your planted aquarium.
The substrate is where your beneficial bacteria lives.
Up here, yes, you're gonna have some of it
going on in your filters.
But down here is where it really happens.
And I wanna show you a clip for my man,
Mr. Greg Sage out in Colorado.
He runs his tanks basically bare bottom,
with the exception, in each one of his aquariums
he has about a handful of gravel.
Why does he run just a handful of gravel?
Because he needs just a handful of gravel
in the bottom of all of his aquariums
to keep everything balanced,
because the beneficial bacteria lives on that gravel.
Just as a quick aside, before I show you
some of my favorite fish rooms and how they filter it,
I'm gonna break it to you like this.
In my humble opinion, if you're trying to run a filter
on anything, call it below a 40 gallon, 50 gallon,
a little hang-on-back is gonna be the best way to go.
Anything 40, 55, 75, 90, 125, I like the FX4s, FX6s,
the big canister filters.
There's been tons of videos on those.
You can click the links around here and see me
putting an FX4 on an old 75 gallon.
The canister filter's gonna give you more surface area
and more rippling water current.
One thing I wanna point out, I'm gonna show this more later,
if you're looking for surface area, you cannot go wrong.
They're ugly as heck, but they're great
when it comes to the biological filtration.
Look out for the sponge filters.
The sponge filters do a lotta good.
And with that said, I wanna show you
what some of the masters' fish rooms I've seen
and how they filter their tanks.
One of the first fish rooms in the filtration involved
that I wanna talk about is my man, Mr. Chuck Bremmer.
He is part of the wonderful and super-strong MASI club
out in St. Louis, Missouri,
along with Gary Don't Carry Lang.
I've been to Chuck Bremmer's house.
Every single one of his aquariums has an air stone in it,
several of them have a giant sponge filter in there
for that beneficial bacteria to live on.
Chuck also does about 20% water per week.
He runs sponges with are stones in every single one of them.
And, in a lot of his aquariums,
he has fast-growing plants because plants eat the nitrate,
the end product of ammonia; nitrite, nitrate.
Chuck Bremmer stuff, click links around here
to check out the full length of that video.
- [Chuck] I wanna take the water that's at the bottom.
Which is, if there's dirt that falls to the bottom,
that's where ammonia is gonna be produced.
I wanna move that water up here
and give it a chance for ammonia to escape into the air.
That's the first line of defense, let it gas.
And ammonia moves into the air very readily,
so that will help.
Then, my second line of defense
is I have a lot of sponge filters
in most of my tanks. - I've seen that.
- [Chuck] And that's essentially a miniature version
of the mat and filter, as an example.
It acts as bacterial bed.
These have not been changed in a year,
in most cases. - Nice.
- [Chuck] And so, it's pulling the water through,
with some detritus, out of the dirt,
I mean out of the water.
And it traps it in there
and then the bacteria break it down.
And then they will break it down into nitrite
and then nitrate, which is in the water.
- The next two fish rooms I'm gonna talk about
were out in Colorado.
One exist still today, one is sadly gone.
It's my man, Mr. Bob Grower I was out there visiting
back when he lived in Colorado.
Love you, Bob. Gotta come see you down in Florida.
My man, Bob had an amazing cichlid fish room.
I was too obnoxious in the video,
so I'm trying to break it down a little more simple for you.
All he used sponge filters and air stones.
And he used a system designed by Mr. Greg Sage,
which is actually an overflow system.
To do water changes, my man,
all he has to do is turn a lever.
He turns that lever, the water runs
all the way down into a drain.
It's a drain-and-fill system.
And then to fill it, he reconnects a pipe
and that pipe runs back up.
And as it fills, it fills this tank.
When that tank's full, it goes on
to the next one and the next one and the next one.
We actually duplicated that,
with a slight modification, in Greenhouse 1.0.
And in a bit I'll show you what I got going on in 2.0
with an even better modification of that.
- [Bob] My good friend, Greg Sage, he's great.
Loves a lot of valves and a master with PVC.
We came in and we did half of this fish room.
And how it's set up is, they're set up
at different levels to drain,
again, depending on the fish, how much water
I wanna drain out of there. - That's awesome.
- So, what happens is,
we set up the attachments that go right to my sink,
and this way it can drain right out
and I can fill it right in.
And when it's not up it goes away
so that the floor is unencumbered.
I really like it.
It's easy, I can turn around, I can open the valves,
and I know I'm not gonna be able to drain it too long.
- [Dustin] That's awesome.
Yeah, so it's a walk away kind of thing.
You can get away from it, you can make it easy on yourself.
And then, last but certainly not least,
I wanna talk about my man, Jesse
who runs the Rocky Mountain Cichlid Association.
They were kind enough to have me
out there to speak a while back.
Folks, it's all about water changes with my man.
He runs giant sponges in all of his tanks.
He's got the big beneficial bacteria in there.
But then he's got standing pipes.
And he has remote control!
Remote control water changes
built with a very super tech system.
I'll show you some of the highlights of it here.
But totally love it.
(equipment buzzing)
- [Jesse] Irrigation controller.
You buy these at any irrigation--
- [Dustin] How much was that, do you think?
- [Jesse] It was probably 140 bucks.
And it has capacity for 18 zones.
I'm only running 12 right now,
but in the future if I wanna add.
And it comes with this wireless remote.
- [Dustin] Nice.
I like it.
- So it comes three zones per setup.
So you can see, one zone, two, tree.
So I've gone three, six,
nine, 12. - Wow.
- [Jesse] Okay, so each one of my tanks
is labeled a different number.
So if we go to tank number 11 here,
it's a 125 with a wild colony of some Aussie frontosa.
I'll go, just for grins, I'll do a two-minute water change
on. - You just pushed the two?
- Pushed the two, then I go on to 11.
And almost like magic. (device beeping)
(water splashing) - Wow.
What'd you do to fill it, just pressed 11?
- [Jesse] Yes.
- [Dustin] And that's filling number 11.
- Ha! Wow. - So that one will run--
- [Dustin] And that's already going
through a de-chlored system.
- Yep. - We're already at temp
'cause you got your mixing valve.
- [Jesse] Yep.
- [Dustin] Wow.
I like it.
While you're sitting here hanging out
and pushing two buttons. - Exactly.
- [Dustin] That's pretty slick, man.
Folks, do me a favor.
Drop me a comment on your favorite type of filter
for your favorite type of tank.
Everybody, make it an awesome week.
And tank on. Later.