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CfishGo

Aquarium Advice Apprentice
Joined
Dec 4, 2024
Messages
41
Location
Canada
On 75G I opted to go with a Tidal wave 110. Water flows over 2, 30ppi sponges first, next is a bag of biomedia (Matrix), next is floss with final stage being a polishing pad. I have no fish yet. I want to get some age on the system and I want the plants to get well established before adding fish. I will be adding Nerites soon.

Is that enough, to much or just wrong altogether? I can't use a canister filter for various reasons, most being limited range of use in my fingers and wrist. Unfortunately I try to stick with velcro these days.
 
Ideally I would want about 1kg of biomedia for every 100 litres of water for a fully stocked aquarium. 75g of water is about 300 litres, so about 3kg biomedia in your aquarium.

Your filter has about 3.5 litre capacity. Take out some capacity for sponge, you are left with maybe 2 litres for biomedia. 1 litre of biomedia is about 1kg, so your filter by that metric is good for a 200 litre/ 50 gallon aquarium in a real life situation.

Another metric is that filters are typically good for about half their rating. Your filter is rated up to 400 litres, 100 gallons. So it's probably good for 200 litres/ 50 gallons.

These 2 different capacities tally up.

How much matrix did you actually get in your filter?

So, i wouldn't fully stock your aquarium, but if the filter is set up optimally you could stock it to the equivalent of a fully stocked 200 litre/ 50 gallon aquarium. While you might get away with a fully stocked 75g aquarium, it wont be as effective at dealing with any spikes that might occur and wont pick up detritus and remove it from the water as well. Your filter isn't massively undersized, but it could be better.

I'm not sure what the difference between floss and polishing pad is. I use floss as a polishing pad. If the floss/ polishing pad is last you will be trapping all the fine detritus with your biomedia, which will cause the pores to get clogged and make it less effective. You want the floss/ polishing media before the biomedia to remove this fine detritus before it gets to your biomedia. The advantage to having the floss/ polishing pad last is that it's easier to change, but your filtration won't work as effectively in that order.

The ideal order of media is sponge/ floss layers from most course to least course, then biomedia, then chemical media.
 
Thank you! Yes, I was thinking the matrix should be last but wasn't really sure. I have 400 grams of matrix in the filter. The extra sponge I put in was to have a backup for my quarantine tank but I've decided I really don't need to do that because by the time I need to quarantine anything I'll have other options. The polishing pad came with it so I just put it in last but now I understand that needs to be placed before the matrix. I'll probably just get rid of it cause my water looks crystal clear anyway. Thanks, Aiken!
 
Here you go.


Substitute the biohome for matrix if that's your preference for biomedia. But that's how I would set up the filter, although i probably wouldn't do the prefilter. Richard backs up my thought that it's a good filter for 200 litres.
 
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If you fill up the filter with biomedia that's going to be quite a lot. If you bagged up the media similar to the video (was it 5 bags?), you could remove one of those bags and use it in a quarantine tank. Add a bag of new media back to your tidalwave HoB when you do this. You might see a short lived mini cycle when you removed the media, but it would only be small and short lived, and you would see similar removing your addition sponge anyway.
 
Omg, thank you for sharing his video. I'll probably end up dumping the matrix and using something else. The matrix came with it and it was bagged. After plants, driftwood, rocks, substrate etc. I figured I would just consider it a 50 g to be on the safe side when stocking but I'm going for a species tank and I hope I can find something to fit my parameters and eventually have 15-20 schooling mid water fish. Oh, and a few snails. Great idea on the bags. I'm going to do that! Thank you again for your time, appreciate it!
 
Matrix is fine as a biomedia. I personally use biohome and K1, but matrix is a good media. I certainly wouldn't dump the matrix if I already had it. If you are adding more biomedia then by all means consider other types, but biomedia is just something that provides surface area for those microbes to grow on. A pair of old socks stuffed in your filtration will do a job.

There is good media and bad media though. Let's start with something like a marble. Microbes can grow on the outside of the marble. If you then progress to something that is the same size as the marble but has a textured surface. The textured marble has more surface area than the smooth marble so would be better biomedia. We can then progress to a ceramic ring, which has that textured surface area, but also you have the outside of the ring and the inside of the ring. So a ceramic ring has more surface area than either of those marble examples and would be better biomedia.

Matrix and biohome provide additional surface area because they are porous. So you have the outside of the media, but also the surface area provided by all the tiny holes which your water flows through. But you need to keep the detritus from filling those voids and reducing its porosity. Sponge is excellent biomedia because of those voids too.

Media like K1 provides surface area because of the shape it's manufactured in. This is K1 media.

Screenshot_20250119_213319_Samsung Internet.jpg
So all those bits of profile on the inside and outside give you additional surface area. K1 floats though (because it's mostly used for fluidised bed filtration in sumps, where it moves around in the water current) and it's very expensive in small quantities (but very cheap in large quantities).

Matrix is generally considered one of the better biomedia choices. It will do a good job.
 
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