Switching filters - how long until new one is mature ?

wrote:
Hi,

I have a 48 x 12 x 15" tank which is home to my three large goldfish.
I am moving from a Fluval Biolife to an Eheim 2213 as the Biolife is
just too noisy inside the tank (for the fish - I'm trying to give them
as natural an environment as possible).

I currently have both filters running, but need some idea of how long
I need to do this before the Eheim is sufficiently mature to run the
show alone.

The problem I've got is that it's a one-way decision - if I pull the
Biolife too early, it'll take a couple of days for the ammonia to
start showing - by which time the Biolife will be bacterially dead and
useless to put back in !

Unless anyone knows of a way to keep the bacterial colony alive with
the media out of the filter ?


I did something similar to what you're doing once when I switched from
an Aquaclear to a Fluval. I put the Aquaclear sponge and bio beads I
was using into one of the media baskets instead of using chemical media
and ran on only the Fluval. A month later, I took the Aquaclear media
out of the Fluval because the Fluval sponge was nice and brown with
bacterial growth. I got no ammonia at all this way.

For the Eheim, you should be able to do the same thing by replacing some
of the Substrat layer with the core, sponge, or hex nodes from the
Biolife. The next time you clean the Eheim, remove the Biolife media
and put in the rest of the Substrat.

If you run both filters, it's going to vary from tank to tank. I'd say
a minimum of 2 weeks, with a month being a conservative, safe length of
time. If there's a way to gradually turn down the flow on the Biolife,
that will help divert more ammonia into the Eheim.

--
__ Elaine T __
__' http://eethomp.com/fish.html '__