epic eheim battle

ok, so canister filters arent for every one, but i love em personally. well, i dont actually feel affection towards a design of aquarium filter, but its a preference. once i find a company i like, im generally fairly loyal to that company...one need look no further than my desk to see not one but two HP computers, and a badass HP calculator (only an engineering student can use the words badass and calculator in such close proximity) to see that im one of those people. the only heater for me is an ebo jager...i dont care what the others are doing, i know what i like and what has worked for me in the past...and when it comes to filters, its ehiem

its not that i never gave fluval a chance, i did...and 20 years ago i thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, despite its failings. at that time all i knew was HOBs...and had a vague awareness of something called a diotomite filter..a rare species that i have seen only once, and whose magical powder i have just recently found at a health food store, but i digress. since my first fluval purchase all those years ago (a mighty feat when i was only making $5.25 an hour), fluval seems to have degenerated to the Playskool "My First Aquarium Filter" school of design. It works for some people but not for me. API has a modular filter that looked intriguing till i looked at the media, which appeared to be no more than multiple HOB filters attached together. No thanks.

That brings me to my choice of filters...Eheim...some here on this forum may know ive been trying to get mine running. My wife bought it in germany, and so my optioned here have been have a 220 volt outlet run to my tank- although my apartment manager may frown on this...or replace the motor on mine. unfortunately no one has been selling derelict eheim professionel IIs lately. I picked up an ECCO from Ron, but still that one was only rated for 35 gallons, half my tank size...so while i was getting better filtration than the crappy aquaclear HOB that i was using (which may not be all that crappy when used for its intended capacity, 10-20 gallons, it might be just fine...on a 75? forget it...it was just the cheapest thing at walmart when all i needed was a cheap filter)

so after rons eheim is happily filtering my tank its doing its job but rather overwelmed...i have a particulate problem where crud is coating the leaves of my plants, which are growing like mad despite this and the cyanobacteria, yet i have this friggin behemoth sitting unused and empty on the other side of the tankstand that goes by the name 2026

cut to another portion of the tank, where a cheap petco powerhead is driving the sweet UV sterilizer i picked up at the aquarium swap meet to the tune of 250 GPH or so(the same swapmeet where i became aware of this group and met several of you without knowing who i was meeting). yea thats higher than i wanted, but it is what it is...

just before i was about to give said powerhead to wife so she could do water changes on her incredibly awesome saltwater tank we just bought...whithout her having to lift a single bucket...well, i take that powerhead back before i even give it to her, cuz i realize, the filter doesnt care if it gets its water from its internal 220 v motor, or an external power head....like a pimp (or the IRS), it just wants its money, @#$! ... so i do some plumbing on the fly, end up wearing a couple gallons of my aquarium, but in the end, i got my mighty 2026 running in all its 5 liters of glory!nolt only that, i have a bada$$ prefilter for my uv sterilizer to keep the internal glass clean...oh yeaaa..

now i cant wait for the seed culture i took from small eheim to propogate within big ehiem to make it the kenny powers (google it) of aquarium filters

i had a bottle of champagne to celebrate. ok, celebrate alone, which is kinda lame..especially considering im celebrating an aquarium filter...but at least i bought it @ 40% off from the local top foods thats closing

Good job with the retrofit! Im glad you made it work. Im sure that the bacterial slime (cyanobacteria) will clear up with the added flow. I had to medicate and change a few things on my tank to clear it up.

yea, im hoping to go scorched earth on that crud....an added benefit is i hope its slightly decreasing the flow rate for my powerhead....im not completely satisfied with my setup at the moment, but its getting there. i want to take the powerhead out of the tank, and place it on the inlet side of the filter/sterilizer pair to act as a pusher pump....currently the powerhead is in the tank as a sucker pump as an outlet...which makes purging air from the system a pain...and its ugly.

problem is, my powerhead has only one hose barb....and my spare barb is for a smaller P/H..so i cant place the head inline with the plumbing

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I think we need pictures of this.

ill get pics up in a bit

Interesting. Kinda like my 5 gallon barrel pond filter ran by a power head sitting on a uplift tube from the undergravel. Kind fun to MacGyver filters.

k...heres the pics...first, the whole tank..looks kinda hazy, i was stirrin up trouble earlier


for comparison, this was taken 3 weeks ago, like i said, the plants have been growing like gangbusters. no co2 during this period...a couple doses of fertilizer for about 5 days


then theres little ECCO, which was holding down the fort alone...and doing a decent job, but i wanted to awaken the slumbering behemoth in the next cabinet


this is the bigger eheim...and uv sterilizer


and its associated mickey mouse plumbing....the intake is the tube sitting at an akward angle, its strainer shimmed onto a too small lift tube using electrical tape. the outlet is the powerhead directly underneath. this is in no way a permanent installation of course. id like the pump on the inlet side of the filter, down in the cabinet. the venturi on the hose barb would make a great co2 injector right before the water goes into the filter


this is an overview of the plumbing side of my tank...in the distance is little ECCO using big eheims spray bar, then little ECCOs lift tube with big eheim strainer, heater, and then a cluster @$&! of hoses for big eheim combined with power cables for heat, both lights, and the powerhead

the rejected remnants...a german 220V plug and a 50Hz impeller (eheim has separate part no's for 50 and 60 Hz regions)