Thinking of making my own filter....

[Miyavp]

So for a while I've been pondering building myself a nice bio filter for my 37gal ryukin tank. I wanted to use a 5gal bucket and not fill it all the way so I would'nt risk it leaking.
My worry is I dont want it to leak and I dont want to risk if something fails it pumping my fish tank dry. I was thinking of having two tubes drilled into the lid an intake and the outtake.
I dont want the water to reach the top of the bucket so would I have to have a pump in the bucket right? If I put the intake tube in the tank higher up would that cause any problems? I was thinking that way if the water got too low it would'nt pump my tank dry. I'll be posting some drawings of what I was thinking.

 

[Miyavp]

Heres a rough stetch

 

[Miyavp]

Better idea....What if I did something like this with a milk jug? Would I need to use a specific kind of tubing?

 

[Miyavp]

I was looking into aquarium safe plastics and read that the best to use is pet or pete plastic without bpa's. And the gallon water jugs I use to refil my tank are pete and bpa free. So I think I might do this with one of them.

 

[Vienolac]

Very interesting idea, nice ingenuity

 

[AquaShark]

I may be wrong but I dont think the bucket idea would work. The pumps would have to pump at the exact same rate, which would be hard to do especially with the head height of the return pump. The milk jug idea seems very plausible though. Try it out and let us know how it works out!

 

[phin]

Your first bucket idea would work with some slight modifications. Instead of using two pumps, just use one. Put a return pump at the bottom of the filter bucket and fashion a siphon-overflow from an old HOB filter. Siphon the water from the tank into the HOB overflow with a hole drilled from be bottom of the HOB and a hose connecting it to the bucket. Gravity will pull water out of your tank and the retun pump will pump it back up. Put a ball valve on the hose from the HOB to the bucket if you need to restrict the outflow to match the return pump.

Make sense?

 

[Miyavp]

Your first bucket idea would work with some slight modifications. Instead of using two pumps, just use one. Put a return pump at the bottom of the filter bucket and fashion a siphon-overflow from an old HOB filter. Siphon the water from the tank into the HOB overflow with a hole drilled from be bottom of the HOB and a hose connecting it to the bucket. Gravity will pull water out of your tank and the retun pump will pump it back up. Put a ball valve on the hose from the HOB to the bucket if you need to restrict the outflow to match the return pump.

Make sense?

Yeah but I ended up buying an aquaclear 70 lol. They had them half off and I got a steal on one