Bio Wheel? Use it or loose it? Surface agitation problems as well

[loganutah]

I have a Emperor 400 HOB power filter. Should I loose the bio weel or does it not make much of a difference on removing Co2?


Also I have lots of surface agitation - The waters as high as can be. Does anyone have any mods to help?

Thanks

[DaveS]

I have a Penguin filter on my 20g tank (biowheel filter as well). I ended up tossing the biowheel and just putting a mesh bag filled with biomedia in the filter instead. I wasn't all that worried about surface aggitation, I just hated that wheel!

Dave

[tropicalfish]

For a planted tank and you are injecting CO2, loose it.

Is your water level up to the lip of the filter output?

[loganutah]

Not quite but It is as full as can be. There are 4 jets on each side that spray water 3" down, so when I remove the bio wheel it makes more bubbles!! SO if I fill it up full of Ceramic media it should be better? I guess I would have to have the media up to the point of touching those jets??

Any other fixes ie- sticking a sponge there????
thanks

[monkeyruler90]

with a heavily planted tank you shouldnt need that much bio filtration, more of mechanical filtration would be better.
sticking a sponge in there along with some of the ceramic media would be a good step

[monkeyruler90]

also, are you injecting co2?
if you are then yeah, take out the biowheel. it looses alot of co2

[ron521]

The spraybars with those jets are adjustable, can spray down, forward, and any angle between. This is to regulate the speed at which the biowheel turns. On my Emperor, I have jets pointing straight forward, so wheel spins slowly. (Have to remember not to remove biowheel with jets pointing forwards, otherwise I get a shower myself).
Emperors have a second slot in front for a grey plastic media container, which can be filled with ceramic noodles, or whatever else you want. You can get additional biological filtration using this.
I have kept my biowheels, they don't seem to hurt anything on my 75 gallon tank full of Anubis (sp?), with only 30 watts total lighting (only turned on for 5 hours per day), no injection.
Someone said you can never have too much filtration, and that applies to biological filtration as well.
Bacteria in the water are competing with your fish for oxygen, however bacteria on the wheels get their oxygen from the atmosphere, so I see the wheels as a good thing.
I have heard of people lengthening their water discharge chute by RTVing a length of plastic to the chute, thus reducing surface agitation. However I can fill my tank to the point where the chutes are touching the water, so have nearly total silence.

[proud2bcanadian]

With my Bio-Wheel Mini on my 10g and my Emperor 280 on my 50g, I tossed the wheels on both. Never even added any extra biological media into the filters and everything's been fine for the past 7 years!

Not even worth the trouble IMO.

Regards,

[fish dork]

plastic pot scrubbers work well as cheap media for these filters as well. Lots of available surface area. I have a Penguin and use the original plastic from the cartridges (with the carbon removed) to hold back filter floss (for catching larger material) and then the pot scrubbers stuffed down in front of the plastic.

[LS6 Tommy]

I posted this response to a similar question a while back:

"I have had all three, regular HOB's, Biowheel HOB's and cannisters. I've been seeing a lot of posts about Biowheels causing CO2 loss lately and decided to take a logical look at all 3. IMO, all HOB's cause CO2 loss. I don't think it's an issue of Biowheels. The Biowheel itself doesn't hold a lot of H2O as it turns, so I don't think there's a lot of CO2 being exposed to the atmosphere. It's basically just "dipping" the Biowheel media into the return H2O to keep the bacteria damp. If the concern is the amount of agitation caused by the Biowheel on the tank's H2O surface, I don't see that either. If anything, the Biowheel usually causes a "softer" return of H2O to the tank, so the concept of increased agitation of the tank's H2O surface may be more or less a myth. In any event, if you run low enough H2O level you'll always have a lot of surface agitation, regardless of filter type.

The highest H2O/air contact in an HOB is due to the turbulance in the chamber between the pump outlet and the filter media, not at the Biowheel. On almost every HOB design I've looked at, this area is vented or open to the atmosphere. On filters that use foam for biological filtering there's even more H2O surface area exposed to the air to off gas the CO2.
Just my $.02"

Whether there's any advantage to running a biowheel I can't say. As previously mentioned, a healthy planted tank will supply all the bio filtration you need.


Tommy

[Mishmosh]

I thought the biowheel would make a nice secondary filter system for when I clean my canister. WRONG! It vented CO2 quite unacceptably. My pH when up 0.3 and even with higher CO2 bubbling rates, I had a hard time getting it down. I removed the penguin and put it on my non-CO2 tank where it is doing a fine job.

[Complexity]

Lose all of it. Lose the Emperor completely. Not only will a canister do a much better job overall, but it's cheaper in the long run.

Add up the price of the Emperor and all of the cartridges you end up buying and replacing. See how much it'll cost you in a year. Then compare that to the canister of your choice (Rena XPs are nice). In the end, you'll save money.

I have two Emperor 280s, and I could not keep a simple 20L tank clean for the life of me. I tried all kinds of media, but the problem remained because of the inherent design of HOB filters.

Take a real close look at how much media you can really put in an HOB. The average Emperor filter contains a little bit of carbon (that you don't need) with a very thin bit of floss. You can use the extra cartridge to add whatever you want, but if you make it too thick, it will overwhelm the Emperor, causing the water to overflow rather than be filtered.

So what do you have? A half inch of filter media? Maybe an inch if you really push it?

Compare that to the several inches of filter media in a canister. Plus, you can pack the canister however you want, including very fine polishing media, if desired.

Also consider the maintenance schedule. With an HOB, you really need to replace the cartridges around every 2 weeks (I know we all push them longer). A canister doesn't need to be maintained but at the very most once a month or bimonthly (some suggest every 3 months). Personally, I don't like doing maintenance. I do it because it's necessary. So when there is a product that can reduce my maintenance, I think it's great!

Plus, the canister does not have the surface agitation, causing CO2 loss, which was the original concern in this thread.

Oh, and there's also the noise factor. Canisters are extremely quiet. HOBs are noisy and get louder when the water level drops.

And there's also the splashing effect on the hood. HOBs always splash water no matter what you do. Canisters can be set up to not splash any water which means you don't get mineral deposits on your hood. If you're using a glass hood with lights, the mineral deposits shade some of the light if its not cleaned off every now and then.

I used to think canisters were only for the big guys with really big tanks; they weren't for the basic hobbyist like me. How wrong I was. Canisters are used by more experienced hobbyist simply because they learned the hard way after using HOBs.

And to be clear, I'm not affiliated with anything so I gain nothing no matter what you use. I just wish someone had told me how much better a canister was than an HOB before I spent a fortune on the Emperor 280s and replacement cartridges and a long list of filter media for the extra cartridge.

[macclellan]

I agree with your post generally, Complexity. Just a few nit-picky points. I have lots of HOBs and lots of canisters.

Originally Posted by Complexity

Lose all of it. Lose the Emperor completely. Not only will a canister do a much better job overall, but it's cheaper in the long run. Add up the price of the Emperor and all of the cartridges you end up buying and replacing. See how much it'll cost you in a year. Then compare that to the canister of your choice (Rena XPs are nice). In the end, you'll save money.

This isn't true if you don't use Emperor Cartidges.

Pro tips on Tweaking HOBs, Emperors in particular:
Remove the Biowheel and place in circular file.
Use an exacto knife and cut the blue pad off the cartridge.
Remove all the carbon and throw away the blue pad.
Now you have a black 'skeleton.'
Place the black cartridge in one of it's two slots at an angle so that you get more room before the filter outlet, yet all water still passes through the cartridge.
Get a bag of filter floss (aka pillow stuffing) and put some before the cartridge. covering where the blue pad was before.
Get a piece of panty hose or a media bag and stuff it with your favorite biomedia. I use smaller pieces of Matrix rock.
Put the media behind the cartridge.
Good to go.

Now the only upkeep expense is changing the floss every few weeks. A bag of floss (which is like $1 or 2) should last a year or longer. Rinse out the media bag in tank water every now and again. I do so monthly.

So, no, Canisters aren't cheaper in the long run. They are more expensive do to identical upkeep costs and far higher initial costs.

Originally Posted by Complexity

I have two Emperor 280s, and I could not keep a simple 20L tank clean for the life of me. I tried all kinds of media, but the problem remained because of the inherent design of HOB filters.

Something else must be going on here...I have 3 20Ls each with one HOB filter. Water is clean as a whistle (and they are cichlid tanks). For bigger tanks, i.e. >20g, canisters are better and worth the extra initial expense, IMHO. I have them on my 30L and two on my 75g.

[honor]

im thinking of attaching some screen and letting it hang into the water so the water has something to ride on on it's way back to the tank.

[fish dork]

I posted this somewhere else, but I used cut pieces of a water bottle attached to the front lid of the Penguin filter. The water rides this back into the tank.

Please excuse the algae