Cycling with old foam filter

[brendan]

I was at the LFS the other day and I was asking the guy there about cycling a new tank and he said the way he usually does it is to squeez out the gunk from an established foam filter into the new tank. Does anyone do this, and does it work?

TIA

 

[Allivymar]

Yep. I have and it does Just make sure the tank you take the filter gunk from is healthy.

 

[Sati]

Is gunk a technical term?

 

[Orca]

I've been thinking about some different ways that I could transfer some of the bacteria from my cycled tank into my new tank.

One method I thought of was to take the Bio-Wheel out of the new filter and float it in the cycled tank for a while, and then drop it back into the new filter when it was time to start up the new tank.

Do you think that would work? Would just floating the wheel in the tank for a week or so cause it to gather some good bacteria?

 

[Roach]

From what I understand if you did do that it would work better if you could keep the bio-wheel in the strongest current of the tank.