Filtration Question

[Renfeild12]

Is 500 gallons per hour enough turnover from the wet/dry (and lifeguard
cannister both fed from one overflow box) for a 120 gallon fish tank? Because
my overflow box is leaking and i have no idea what size it is, or what size to
buy..

[NetMax]

"Renfeild12" > wrote in message
...
> Is 500 gallons per hour enough turnover from the wet/dry (and lifeguard
> cannister both fed from one overflow box) for a 120 gallon fish tank?
Because
> my overflow box is leaking and i have no idea what size it is, or what
size to
> buy..

Depends on what your are doing. For large voracious carnivores, more
turbulence and more biological capacity is generally desirable. For
lightly loaded plant tanks, less turbulence is desirable and the extra
biological capacity is not as critical. Very large tanks do better with
more distributed returns, than with a single return (more uniform heating
etc). The more water breaks you have (lots of rockwork), the more
powerful and directed water flow you can use. Slow large fish (Discus,
Angelfish) do better in lower turbulence (minimize buffeting) while long
cylindrical fish (danios, many tetras etc) can actually prefer higher
turbulence (for exercise and the tank seems bigger to them). I'm not
familiar with wet/dry operating ranges (also varies by your exposed media
surface area), though I don't think that it's critical, or that it
requires a lot of turbulence (other than to keep everything wet). For
the tank size, 500gph is certainly in the ballpark. hth
http://www.2cah.com/netmax/basics/filters/filters.shtml

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