Filter and a thick background

[jgsketch]

Hello,
This is my first post. Great site. There seems to be alot of information in here.

I currently have a 75 gallon tank with a canister filtration unit. The way the intake is set up, it hangs over the side and into the water, like most of the smaller tanks. I wish to add a thick 3d background to my tank, but then my intake would get in the way. So I was thinking about setting it up so the water flows over the top of the 3d background into a cavity. Similar to Sulla's inlet on the 3D background.

My question is, what is better to have? Is it better to pull the water in from the top and getting the surface water, or having the inlet down in the water?

This is a 75 gallon FW tank with a Filstar XP2 Canister Filter http://www.aquariumguys.com/filstarxp2.html

Thanks for your help.

Jeremy

 

[JProx]

well if you had the pipe at the top, how deep would you have it? the reason i ask is because if your water level dips below that even temporary, the canister will run dry, and/or have air sucked into the impellar housing, and result in more work for you.

i have an old fluval 303, that i dread having to clean every month because reguardless of how careful i am, air enters the system and breaks the syphon, or excessive amounts of air bleed into the canister body, and eventually get into the impellar housing causing me to tip and shake the unit a bunch of times to get the canister functioning again.

surface skimming is always the best course of action, for any filter. simply because it can remove a film that sometimes collects at the surface that can impede the oxygen replentishment cycle (co2 being exhausted from the water, and having oxygen pulled into the water, to balance pressure) however if you have enough surface agitation it probably won't be needed. the only benefit to pulling water from the bottom of the tank, is that some solid waste might be taken up and keep the tank/gravel more visually clean.

 

[jgsketch]

Thanks for the response. I do have alot of water movement on the surface due to my airator. The bubbles seem to break the surface. I gues it would be harder to get large particles of waste when the water is being filtered at the top rather than midway to bottom of the tank. Maybe I need to add another filter for the top, but that might be overkill.

 

[JProx]

with my fluval, particles need to be 1inch from the pipe before they sucked in, if they are any further away the pipe doesn't bother sucking them up and they just float through the tank, my aqua clear 300 has more force behind it. going mid way down the tank would be better than goign straight to the bottom if that would help, least some particles would be caught, abiet not much since the diameter of the tube is the restricting factor.