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Gunk, what am I doing wrong???

jameson_uk

jameson_uk

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Location
Birmingham
Just cleaning the filter again and after moving to an eight week schedule I am still seeing masses of gunk in the filter.

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Is what was left at the bottom of the filter but there was plenty of this silty gunk right the way through.

Filter is an eheim 2217 with a few cm of efimech, a corse sponge and then eheim substrat pro. There is also an eheim pre filter in place. I rinse the sponges in the pre-filter twice a week and that is always pretty funky but this small stuff seems to be getting in.

What am I doing wrong to create this amount of gunk? I don't think I am overfeeding (although I have in the past), I am not overstocked and I try and remove any dead / dying leaves as I spot them. I have also cleaned all the pipework recently too.

I can add some fine sponge / floss which I guess should catch it but it seems others don't get anything like this to start with so would prefer to reduce the source of the gunk.

Filter is now spotless but it will be back like this in a few weeks.
 
That's normal isn't it - do other people not get it? My tank stays pretty clean, I don't often syphon but that's what it looks like after I rinse my filter pads. It's poop and plant decay. If you've got shrimp/algae eaters they'll be eating constantly and turning it into poop not just what you feed in fish food.
 
This is what I got from vacuuming my bottom this morning...:D I get this every week, even more if I rinse the filters...

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Is this right through your filter or just what is left when you clean it? My bio media looked like this right at the top of the filter (and took three rinses to get it clean). The pic was what was left after the media and sponges had been removed and cleaned (which took a considerable amount of gunk out). Only thought to take a picture when I was nearly done...

This was cleaning the pre-filter which is like this every time I clean it (I think I was away midweek so this is a week's worth)
 
Nothing to worry about, perfectly normal. I tend to clean my external every quarter, unless i see a dip in flow.
The amount of Gunk(Mulm) that comes from a shrimp tank is insane. Little pooping machines they are.
 
This is out of my 30L, last cleaned 2 weeks ago (very thoroughly twice) bucket was what I syphoned out of the bottom (a lot of shrimp poop!) and the jug is the sponge filter contents - 100ml of goo.
 

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Hi all,
jameson_uk said:
Just cleaning the filter again and after moving to an eight week schedule I am still seeing masses of gunk in the filter.
Click to expand...
tam said:
That's normal isn't it
Click to expand...
It is normal, the gunk is the "difficult to decompose" residue from biological filtration.

Basically all the easily decomposed protein and carbohydrates have been biologically oxidised, and what is left are the structural carbohydrates with a very high carbon:nitrogen ratio. It takes a long time to degrade these because you need an additional nitrogen source and the amount of energy that an organisms can retrieve from them is only fractionally higher than the amount of energy that it expends.

If you put some Shrimps or Asellus with dead leaves (or woodlice in a container with damp wood), after about a year you end up with a few Asellus and a container with a small amount of very similar material to the gunk you get out of the filter.

It is fundamentally the same process, the shrimp/Asellus/woodlice shred the leaves, but they need fungi to degrade the lignin and cellulose in the leaves/wood before they can eat the growing fungi and bacteria and as they process the woody fragments (they don't really, their gut bacteria do) they produce a smaller volume of woody debris bits.

It is exactly the same process if you just have microbes, they are doing all the decomposing work, the shrimps etc. (detrivores) are just providing them with smaller fragments to work on.

cheers Darrel
 
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Yep, looks normal to me..
jameson_uk said:
Is this right through your filter or just what is left when you clean it? My bio media looked like this right at the top of the filter (and took three rinses to get it clean). The pic was what was left after the media and sponges had been removed and cleaned (which took a considerable amount of gunk out). Only thought to take a picture when I was nearly done...

This was cleaning the pre-filter which is like this every time I clean it (I think I was away midweek so this is a week's worth)
Click to expand...



Doing a water change myself right now and I cleaned the pre-filters. Mine barely have anything at all to clean after a week and they can probably last weeks without cleaning and affecting the flow. However, the tank has no plants inside and the substrate is a thin layer of sand. When I had a planted soil tank, my pre-filters looked like yours...For some reason planted soil tank=a lot of gunk....I wonder if its something to do with soil particles because in my planted sand shrimp tank the pre-filter stays rather clean as well, so does the actual filter media....

Tip to clean sponges: Don't squeeze the sponge. Put it under strong running water and start shaking it without any squeezing. It will preserve the life of the sponge and it will stay intact for longer, plus it gets the gunk out better.
 
Just would have figured the pre-filter would have stopped more of this entering the filter in the first place. I reckon flow is starting to be affected after about six weeks so couldn't figure out how some people were saying they only clean their filter media every quarter or six months.
 
I don't use any fine grade sponge, i tend to clean my filters quarterly to 6 months, not had a problem with flow to be fair, but maybe thats because im using like pp10 or 20 not pp60 sponges, i see the same brown gunk when i clean my sponges, just not as much, i think a lot resides in my substrate.
 
I DIYed a prefilter to be the longest length that I could still easily remove. It consists of a pipe dremelled to have slots it's entire length with foam wrapped around it.

It clogs slowly from top to bottom. If I clean it every couple of months the bottom 2/3 is still fairly clean. Takes 6 months to get fully dirty. I clean it somewhere inbetween, usually when the pump on the attached canister starts getting noisy.

Fry and shrimp adore it (except for a couple of weeks straight after cleaning where it gets ignored).

I still get a dirty filter but it's very fine mulm.

Only downside is it's pig ugly. I covered it in moss once, it attached fine, but was a pain come cleaning time.
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what I like to do is attach the Inlet pipe to a Sponge Filter with a little super glue, or just push fit it the size matches. And it works great, and means that it is a huge prefilter. and does not need rinsing out for a long time.
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That's on my todo list :oops: I did grow copious amounts of bba on them, they blended in nicely then :confused: The snails then cleaned it all off (Tarebia Granifera ftw).
 
Looks normal to me, I only clean my filters every 3 months and generally see a lot of this stuff sitting in the bottom of the filter, personally I would remove the fine filter pad / floss they restrict to much flow.
 
doylecolmdoyle said:
Looks normal to me, I only clean my filters every 3 months and generally see a lot of this stuff sitting in the bottom of the filter, personally I would remove the fine filter pad / floss they restrict to much flow.
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No fine pad is in there. This is what confuses me though !!! I would expect to find this sitting in the bottom but I have a whole 6l of filter which is like this right up to the pump.

I might up rinsing the filter media to every six weeks but I guess it is the nerites and amanos which are poop monsters.

What PPI sponges do others use on their pre-filters?
 
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