(jazz music)
- [Matthew] Hey everybody, Matthew here from My first-
Hey everybody, Matthew here from Marine D-
Get it together.
Hey everybody, Matthew here from Bulk Reef Supply.
Let's make some beginner videos.
(jazz music)
Hey everybody, Matthew here, your beginner guru at BRS.
From now on, when you see me.
When you see this face, this mug,
you are gonna be getting beginner videos.
I'm so happy that we're gonna be able
to pick up where we left off with our beginner
'how to' guide for saltwater aquariums, and reef tanks.
And this episode,
we're coming at you with episode number 20,
mechanical filtration.
Even though mechanical filtration is the absolute backbone
of filtration in the saltwater aquarium hobby,
my experience has been
that beginners don't fully understand
what mechanical filtration is,
what kind of maintenance to do,
the different types out there,
and what our end goal is with mechanical filtration.
So let's start off episode 20,
and jumped straight in to answer the question:
What is mechanical filtration?
Very simply mechanical filtration
removes particulate matter from water.
It removes things. It removes fish food,
fish poop, free floating algae,
anything that's a solid substance it's going to remove.
The easiest way to understand it is with a sponge.
And I actually prepared a little experiment.
So we got a sponge.
We have some water,
and we have a whole bunch of pieces of paper.
So we're going to take the paper,
I'm going to put it in the water.
I'm gonna swirl it around. Wait I got more paper.
I have more paper here. Okay.
We're going to swirl it around.
Here's your sponge. Here's mechanical filtration.
You take the mechanical filter,
whatever it's going to be and you pour it through.
And I'm just going to pour this right on my desk. Ready?
Here we go. Here we go.
Oh. Did you see that?
The water passed through,
and look what was filtered out, all of the paper.
That's mechanical filtration.
So why is mechanical filtration important?
There's three things that it really does.
Probably the first,
and most important part of mechanical filtration
is it removes that particulate matter,
those organics from your water,
and you remove them
before they break down into toxic ammonia.
The second is that it polishes your water.
It just makes it more clear,
rather than having a whole bunch of free floating
particulate matter, and organics in the water.
A mechanical filter can remove those
and increase the water clarity.
And thirdly, it helped keeps your Nitrate,
and Phosphate levels low by
removing organics from the water.
So do you need mechanical filtration
in your saltwater aquarium?
The most simple answer for a beginner
is 100%, absolutely, positively, yes you do.
As you progress in the hobby and get more advanced,
you're going to run into people
who don't really use traditional forms
of mechanical filtration anymore.
Rather, they might use something
like an extremely well-stocked refugium
with tons of macro algae that's consuming
so many of the nutrients,
that they haven't found a need for mechanical filtration.
But while it's possible to run an aquarium
with very little to no mechanical filtration,
the people who do that are by far the exception to the rule,
and not the rule itself.
So as the beginner, absolutely,
you are going to run some form of mechanical filtration,
and just FYI, I have eight tanks in my gallery right now,
every single one of them runs at least
one form of mechanical filtration.
So what are the types of mechanical filtration?
Well, number one is a sponge.
It's probably your most simple.
You can get them in more course kinds like this,
or you can get them with a finer mesh,
which filters out smaller particulate matter.
Number two, and probably the type you hear most about
in this hobby are our filter socks.
These are filter socks. They come in in different sizes.
You get a filter sock holder,
and all it does is the water passes
into the filter sock,
and particulate matter is filtered out.
You take these out, you wash them, you're done.
Your standard filter sock, kind of like this,
it's kind of this thick Fleece material.
Comes in 200 microns,
which is probably good for 99% of beginners.
The third kind of mechanical filtration
is what we call in the hobby filter floss.
All it is, you've probably seen this over at Michael's,
it's a huge bag of stuffing.
And this stuffing is basically what you find
when you do like a build a bear,
or you, you know, you make your own stuff.
You stuff this in there, and what you do with it,
is you just pull a little bit off at a time,
and you stick it where your sponge goes,
or where your filter sock goes,
and then all you do is you just pull it out,
and you throw it away.
You go back to your bag, and you grab some more.
That way you never have to stop and wash your filter socks,
or pull out your sponge, and clean it,
and clean it, and clean it.
Some people really prefer polyester filter fiber.
I've used it in the past. I don't currently use it,
but it's definitely a good option.
A media cup is basically a cup, right?
So this is a, this is a filter sock, right?
And this is a cup, and a media cup would have
all sorts of holes on the bottom.
And then you just place the media cup
in where you would place the filter socks.
So instead of a filter sock,
and then water passes into the media cup,
and then it filters out.
So you could take something like,
like a sponge, put a sponge in a media cup,
or you could take something like the filter floss,
and put the filter floss in the media cup,
and then it would catch it.
Media cups are, are super helpful.
If you have a filter sock holder,
whether it's in a rear filtration chamber,
or in a sump,
and you want to use something like filter floss
to make your life a little bit easier.
I think we're up to number five,
which is a protein skimmer.
And hold on a second, hold on a second.
I gotta go grab one so I can show you.
The basics of a protein skimmer.
It has a pump down here. The pump creates bubbles.
This chamber fills with bubbles,
fills with bubbles, and then the organic matter,
the fish food, the fish waste,
whatever else is attracted to those bubbles,
and those bubbles rise, rise, rise, rise, rise,
and they go to the top,
and they overflow into a collection cup,
and then what you do, mechanical filtration,
is you remove the collection cup and you clean it.
I would say protein skimmers are one of the backbones
of mechanical filtration in this hobby.
You don't need a mechanical filter to be successful.
It really depends on your tank.
My seahorse tank over here has no protein skimmer.
My reef tank here has no protein skimmer.
My harem tank does have a protein skimmer,
and my tanks over here don't have protein skimmers.
Really a protein skimmer is there for
medium to high nutrient loads.
If you're going to put a lot of fish
and livestock in your tank,
and you're finding that a filter sock,
or filter floss isn't quite filtering enough,
then you can add a protein skimmer.
You can buy protein skimmers like this one
that fit in a sump.
There are also protein skimmers that are a lot smaller,
that fit in a rear filtration chamber,
or that even hang off of the side.
So there are a lot of options out there
for a protein skimmer.
And number, number six,
the six kind of mechanical filtration
is a fleece roller mat.
I've never used a roller mat, but I've seen them,
and I think they look fantastic.
Here are some images of a roller mat.
Roller mats basically fit into your sump compartment
that houses your filter sock,
and what it does is it has a little water level sensor.
So as the fleece gets clogged up,
the water level will slowly rise in that chamber.
And once it reaches a sensor, that will trigger a motor,
which will then roll up a little bit
of that fleece filter sock,
exposing new, and clean fleece to continue filtering.
This is fantastic for mechanical filtration because
you don't have to get in there all the time.
To either clean out your filter socks,
or remove your sponge.
The fleece roller mat does it for you.
The only real thing you have to do is
replace that fleece roller mat when it's used up,
and you're good to go.
Can you over mechanically filter your water?
Absolutely, absolutely you can.
When I started out in this hobby,
when I was a total beginner,
the goal for me, and really the goal,
and the hobby was, zero nitrates, and zero phosphates.
So we use all sorts of GFO,
and we used oversized protein skimmers
with different layers of mechanical filtration
to achieve zero nutrient levels.
Well, here's what we've learned in this hobby.
If you have zero phosphates, and zero nitrates,
you cause a couple of really big problems in your tank.
The first problem is,
your corals are not going to reach
their full color potential,
and they're also not going to grow nearly as quickly,
and in fact, some of your corals
may even die without phosphates or nitrates in your water.
They need some levels of those things.
The other thing we've noticed,
is when your phosphate and nitrate levels get too low,
other kinds of nuisance algaes,
and bacteria tends to take over.
So you get outbreaks like hair algae outbreaks,
cyanobacteria, and dinoflagellates,
which you don't need to know about,
but they are such a pain to get rid of in your aquarium.
The last thing I want to touch on today
is what kind of maintenance is needed
for all of the types of mechanical filtration
we talked about today.
But before we do that,
we made a fantastic video all about filter socks,
and actually, there's two great videos
all about filter socks, and the BRS investigates series
basically found out that if you change your filter sock,
or your mechanical filtration,
whatever it is, every three to four days,
that's like the perfect amount.
If you want to check out those videos,
we will pin a link in the comments below.
Let's start with filter socks.
Once they're dirty, how do you clean them?
The easiest way to clean them is just to pull out
your filter sock once it's filthy,
go over to your washing machine,
put it in your washing machine,
and don't put any soap in there,
but fill up your bleach compartment with bleach,
run it on hot, put it in the dryer,
and you're pretty much done.
If you want to take it to the next level,
what you can do, is you can take your filter sock,
and you can turn it inside out.
Once it's inside out, you can go to your sink,
or you can go outside and you can rinse it off first,
then go ahead, put it in your washing machine,
add some bleach, do not add soap.
Wash it, dry it, and you should be good to go.
Now, obviously you may be thinking right now
you're putting bleach in your aquarium.
No, no, no, no, no.
If you were to put bleach in your aquarium,
you would kill everything obviously,
but once bleach dries out, it's no longer toxic.
So as long as you wash this and dry it,
and make sure it's completely dry,
it's completely safe to put back in your tank.
Second up is sponge maintenance.
This is probably the easiest one.
You just pull your sponge out, you go to the sink,
you rinse it several times until the water runs clear,
then get as much of that tap water out as you can,
and put it back in place.
Okay, okay, I take it back.
I said, I said, sponge maintenance was the easiest,
but I actually think filter floss maintenance is the easiest
because all you do is you remove the filter floss,
you throw it in the trash,
and you add some more filter floss. That's it.
Skimmer maintenance also relatively simple.
Once this gets somewhat full,
I never liked to let this fill all the way up
because one you're going to spill it.
And two, sometimes these things can bubble over,
and then all those nitrates,
and nastiness goes back into your tank.
But all you do is you take the top portion off,
you go to the sink, you dump it out,
you give it a quick rinse, put it back on and it's done.
And lastly, for those of you who want to explore
the roller mat option, your job is probably easiest of all.
You just have to watch for when that roller mat
is all used up, buy a new roller mat,
put the roller mat in, and you're done.
Well that's it everybody.
We finished our first episode here at BRS.
Thank you for watching. That was episode 20.
We'll put a link to those two videos we talked about
either in the description below,
or pin them to the comments.
Next week, episode 21 is,
Wait, I know this, I wrote it down.
Biological filtration.
As always everybody, thank you for watching.
Happy reefing, be well, and we'll see you next time.
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