So I went the Oil-Dri route and dumped ~20lb into my 29G, cloudiness went away within 48hrs...but the slightest disturbances make the cloudiness return...i searched and everyone seems to be using it without any problems. I tried to rinse it but it's got soo much fine powder that it never seems to rinse out completely and is always gets cloudy...

This is what Ive been doing. I use a emperor 400 HOB filter and FOUR of the gray cartridges stuffed with poly fill until they almost pop open. I toss this on whenever I move a few plants around. It pretty much polishes the water and its easy to setup. It doesnt work as well as my diatom filter, but it isnt as much headache!

This is my first day with SMS(completed substrate change 1:00AM this morning). When I woke up later this morning, I went and put some nylon pantyhose (g/f' kindly donated an old pair) over the end of the siphon and used that to get the fine dust that was sitting on top this morning. That worked great.

yes, I still get a little dust if I poke around in there, but nothing to bad.

Overall this my first SMS attempt is less cloudy than the first time I used flourite.

-Scott

haha

Thats what I do with my penguin 330 with two of the media baskets with poly & stuff 4 filter cartridges in there--and here I thought I was doing too much filtering to get rid of it