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doing away with filters.

Mine's in the back rear corner, right at the top and it's even less obtrusive, but I'm not hung up on things being in the tank really. I even have a Juwel corner filter in mine!!!!
 
I'm baffled by all this flow. I have a 2028 on mine giving 4x real turnover stright down the tank 3" under the surface. Then I have a 400lph internal filter outputting through a spraybar right down the tank along the surface. Nice water circulation and gentle waving of crypts etc. down the whole tank.

Then I bought a Koralia nano to replace the internal. It gives super good flow because it creates a sort of perpetual motion maelstrom circling the whole tank, the extra current from the water pulled into the wake of the the 900lph ouput from the Koralia must be 2 or 3 times the extra output - giving me 8 or 12x flow + 4x = maybe 16x. Its too much - I chomp through CO2 at twice the speed and the fish are blown all over. The Koralia went back into a drawer.

Is this just that crypts don't block so much flow as stems do? Is my positioning wierd? What are you all doing with these massive Koralias?

Re. filter media - 3 weeks after I doubled my sintered glass from 2l to 4l my tank suddenly went stable and all my cloudy water issues and algae on sand issues vanished, not even algae on the glass to speak of. Co-incidence or not, I'd always stuff my filter with sintered glass media.
 
I would suggest it is the other way around in that Crypts probably block the flow more than stems do. My tank is full of crypts. I have my Koralia1 near the surface though and pointing straight across the tank. I have no problems with fish being blown about nor plants being bent over.

AC
 
Well I got a Hydor 2 pump..... awesome.
A little bit of staghorn which was starting to come back due to unstable Co2 went within a day!!
Everything is waving gently and the fish love it.
 
Ive used the koralias to good effect in the past. After a blackout a koralia was installed to add more circulation, end of Cyno problems!

as for loosing filters - I have a 60 x 30 x 30 runnning with no filter at present, It happened quite by accident as I discovered it had been unplugged by my daughter (9) turns out it had been off for a week! So i left it off, some weeks later and my Wild green neons seem unaffected! an unintentional experiment that I wont suggest you all rush out and try but interesting all the same!

Cant help thinking of all those reefkeepers who have long ago ditched their biologiocal filters and increased flow rates with internal pumps. Fair enough they have copious amounts of live rock (biological surface area) to fall back on. In a heavily planted tank are the surfaces of our plants providing a home for bacteria to colonise? Think of pond filter brushes and then look at Myriophylums and cabombas - living filter brushes?
 
Wow! But I suppose if you think about it, in a well established planted tank, there must be copious amounts of good bacteria in the substrate, and if you have enough flow (circulation pumps) then the bacteria ridden substrate will get enough oxygen to survive much the same way as the bacteria in our filter canisters.
 
Established plants' roots put enough oxygen into the substrate for this to happen. Not sure on how effective the substrate is compared to filters though. Thinking more of removing particles from the water etc.

AC
 
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