Best cannister filter....?

Well, I wanted to get the Eheim but ran across a Fluval 204 on sale for just
over $50 at a corporate chain pet store I happened to be in because my
girlfriend buys cat litter there (I prefer the little mom and pop LFS
generally even if some of the kit is cheaper at the chain)

Anyway, thus begins my first experience with a cannister in something like
15 years of keeping cichlids and always having mulitple tanks. To
reiterate, I had always stuck with the good old Aquaclear 300 or 500 because
of their simplicity, reliability and effectiveness (every other power filter
I ever tried eventually broke or dramatically deteriorated in terms of
performance). The power filters always worked fine, providing good aeration
and biological filtration, enough to keep my 55 and 75 gallon tanks cristal
clear literally for years. They did have a few drawbacks which most here
probably know of. In this case though we just moved to a fancy new
apartment and my girlfriend demanded I get a noiseless and inconspicuous
filter so I went with the cannister finally.

Very first impressions were good, it came with a lot of filter media
including foam, carbon, and those ceramic noodles for bacteria growth. The
whole thing looked pretty clean in terms of design and competently put
together, and clearly a whole step beyond the power filter in filtration.
Yesterday I was pretty pleased with it as it lay still in the box.

Tonght I put it together and was a bit put off as I started. My god the
complexity! I build plastic model kits as a hobby some times, tanks and
airplanes, and I found the instuctions for this thing pretty daunting in
comparison. Next part of the setup is you are supposed to cut the hose with
a knife and use half of it for the input and half for the out-flow.
Couldn't they come up with a better system for that? I ended up screwing
this up a bit and my inflow tube is now about a foot longer than the
outflow, requiring me to put a couple of old phone books under the cannister
filter to allow it to reach.

More problems with the hoses followed... to secure the hoses to the brackets
hanging over the rim and from there to the inflow and outflow nozzles, the
kit comes with these rubber bands which are the chief way you hold the hose
down onto the clamps over the rim of the tank. A bit weak of a design
considering how catastrophic it could be if the outflow hose especially were
to come loose and fall out of the tank! Is this how all these things work?
I was suddenly missing my simple hard plastic Aquaclear inflow nozzle.

The instructions also don't explain that you are meant to double these
rubber bands to hold everything in place causing me to have to redo the damn
thing after setting it up the first time. Suckers were popping off, water
getting everywhere... I was getting pretty frazzled. I got it together more
or less finally, but this whole aspect left me rather uncomfortable and I'm
going to buy a new hose and redo the whole thing from scratch again so that
it all fits together a bit better.

After that, it was a breeze, I used the manual primer to pump water through
the thing, then plugged it in. So far so good. The tank is a bit milky
from fine particles I wasn't able to completely wash out of the gravel, so
I'll see if this new fangled cannister filter can clean it up a bit tonight.

It's not too powerful in terms of flow, I didn't look up how many GPH but
eyeballing it, it looks about the same as the Aquaclear 300 I had been using
on the (new) tank previously, but it's only a 30 gallon cube tank so it
should be powerful enough. And my better half appreciates that quiet
operation.

DB