Making steel inlet/outlet baby shrimp safe

[Paulthewitt]

Hi all

I have a stainless steel outlet/inlet lily pipe for my tank i'm setting up with a Oase 600 attached.
I am looking to make the outlet/inlet (whichever it is that sucks the water to the filter) as safe as possible for cherry shrimp and the babies. I know the babies get everywhere, but if I can limit it, great!

So how do I do this and any suggested products.
What do you all do?

I have had a search on here and online elsewhere, but can only realy find satisfactory answers to the skimmer part so far - hance my question. of course I could have missed a perfect thread, in which case please feel free to link to it.

many thanks

Paul

 

[Paulthewitt]

I should add - I have seen the stainless mesh guards - but these seem to be for plastic pipes and I'm not sure how they would fit over the lip at the bottom of the steel inlet/outlet.

 

[Hufsa]

Stainless mesh shrimp guard, you'll find it in every price range although the fleabay ones are perfectly fine Works a treat, just check that the inlet doesn't clog every now and then.

 

[Hufsa]

These ones seem to be specially made for aquascaping stuff, although you might need to find a different source

 

[mort]

I just bought a couple of cheap ones from eBay several years ago. I do have plastic pipe but the ones I have have rubber inserts between the metal and where the plastic pipe fits. These little rubber bits can easily be manipulated to fit snuggly.

 

[Courtneybst]

@Paulthewitt I had this exact problem recently. I bought some custom made stainless steel mesh guards from another UKAPS user that slip into the inside and look inconspicuous. They look and work great, however if you've got a skimmer one you'll more than likely find your skimmer part sinks and stops working due to lack of draw power. I eventually took it out and used it elsewhere.

If you don't need the skimmer part, you can do what I did on one of my stainless steel pipes - I took out the plastic skimmer out and stuffed the hole with a filter sponge so you can't see it. You could then put the mesh on the inside behind the grill.

 

[Aqua sobriquet]

I used this:

Intake strainer

I received a stainless intake/outlet set today and the submerged intake had rather large slots. Easily big enough to suck in some of my juvenile shrimps. Luckily I saw a YouTube video the other day of a guy making his own intake strainers from stainless steel mesh so I ordered some. The size...

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And this:

Skimmer modification

The external filter on my 60L was overdue cleaning and when I took the lid off there were about 100 live cherries in there. I’ve managed to get them all back in the tank and cleaned the filter but what to do about the skimmer? From past experience these things are often pretty useless and I...

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