It was suggested to me that other than just doing just water changes to lower my nitrate level that I should have had removed all filter media from my Eheim 2213 canister filter during the cycle process because it will collect the massive amount of dirt and nitrogen from my initial cycle. Does anyone agree with this? All my paramaters are 0 except for Nitrogen which is now at about 30 after some water changes. I just took out my filter media and just ran the filter empty. A massive amount of white "snow-like" debri went flying all over my tank. Should I put the filter media back?
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Remove canister filter media during cycle?
- Thread starter Altohombre
- Start date
8) I agree with Carlo, use the canister to remove large particle matter especially if you blow detritus off of your LR.
Consider large granule phosphate or nitrate absorber like seachem, marine carbon granules and simple floss/fiber in the eheim.
HTH
Doug
Consider large granule phosphate or nitrate absorber like seachem, marine carbon granules and simple floss/fiber in the eheim.
HTH
Doug
are you sure the suggestion wasn't to remove all the filter PADS from the cansister? I've never heard of running a canister with nothing in it, but it is pretty common to remove all of the pads and just run the media chambers without them. The "theory" is that the pads will trap too much detritus into the canister, and if you're not dilligent in cleaning it, it will become a nitrate factory. That's the belief anyway.
I think he was mostly concerned with removed the pads and only leaving some phosphate thing that I wasn't too sure about. But in the end he suggested just taking everything out and using it just for water flow till cycle was over. The problem is that on the Eheim 2213 the filter media is one big canister with everything packed into it. It seems somewhat difficult to separate it without ruining all the different sections. When I clean it what should I do exactly? I ran fresh water through it and tried to squeeze as much of the dirt out of the top black filter pad when I cleaned it last. Is there something more advanced that I should be using other than fast tap water and squeezing?
are you using fresh water to just wash the floss pad - or are you washing all the media?Altohombre said:
definitely don't wash those tubular-kinda pieces...that's the media eheim uses so the ammonia/nitrite eating bacteria can colonize on...
Personally I think the cannister filter works but it is a bit of a maintenance pain...to make life easier -if you haven't done so yet, you might want to try and pick up some ball valves to help keep the pump primed. I never had those ball valves and if this was a thread about flooding - I can tell many a story about my eheim cannister...
in terms of the other media I pretty much just took the whole thing of media and ran warm tap water through it. Hopefully I didn't ruin too much of the bacteria growth.