Bottom posted.


"John..." wrote in message
...
Hi,I am looking for recommendations on external canister filters.
Currently I have a 200 litre tank with fake plants and around 50
fish ranging in size from 2 4 inch clown loaches to a few neon
tetras. I am running a UGF powered by 2 powerheads operating
at a combined 300GPH.The filtration is supplemented by a
Fluval 2plus internal filter. My tank has been running for just over
1 year with no problems. Lately my water has gone from being crystal clear
to slightly cloudy/hazy. I can still see the fish ok,but the hazy water is
annoying me. I'm thinking this is due to a build
up of mulm under the filter plate,so I devised a tube that fits onto my
gravel vacuum that can be inserted under the filter plate.This does remove
a
lot of mulm,but obviously does not remove all of it.
I don't want to do a full stripdown of the tank,so I thought I could
improve the filtration by adding an external canister filter.
Your thoughts would be welcome on this.
Thanks.

John.






Well the fluval msfs (404, etc.) are always great but your current
filtration should be fine. What you might try is getting some 50 micron
filter material and use that with your current filtration if you can (it's
cheap) or buy a fluval msf just to use the 50 micron filtration but you
should be able to use this material with almost literally any filter (I am
thinking you could use it with the fluval internal of yours). I find that
too much of a water change at one time in the past might have clouded one of
my tank's water or it could have been caused by a switch in brand's of flake
food which went away after continuing to use that cloud causing flake food.
In cases of ambiguous cloudiness (like whatever happened like I was just
talking about) coincidentally I used a 1 micron vortex diatomaceous earth
filter on it and it seemed to clear the water from only a hint of cloudiness
to clear. It never happened (the cloudiness) again after I started cleaning
filter sponges in tank waste water (actual water from the tank, i.e. same
temperature, ph hardness, etc., exact same water, i.e. actual tank water)
instead of rinsing them under tapwater and I now am sure that my tap water
kills off beneficial bacteria in filter sponges and possibly the dieoff of
that beneficial bacteria directly or indirectly caused the cloudiness in the
past. And like another user here said - watch yourself for overfeeding, it's
too easy to overfeed to not take it seriously. Good luck and later!