You can find plastic screening with small enough pores to block the micron-measured sand?
I'm using fine play sand and regular window screening works for that. They do make super fine nylon screening for plankton filters, but for fine sand I've used a layer of that fine filter gauze, but that looked funky throught the side of the aquarium.
Also, do you ever have problems with any rooted plants?
No experience with rooted plants. I use Riccia, java Moss and Java Fern.
You don't have to cover the entire aquarium with it anyway. The idea would be for fiter feeders to do just the area in front of the filter outflow. I have a 40 gallow low tank and I just put the undergravel filter in half of it.
Thanks. Trying to plan for a planted invertebrate tank soon(relatively speaking), with shrimp as the main feature.
I'll be using a 55 gallon tank (currently housing hermit crabs, but want to build a better home for them). Perhaps a 10 gallon sized UGF to create the current, covered in natural "gravel" with about 2" extra gravel around the plate edges, and then sand for the rest. Wonder if that would be enough to prevent the sand from being pulled in from the sides of the UGF plate.
Ahh well, will be at least a couple months before I can start and likely a month or two getting everything I need to get it started. Plenty of time to plan and pester in the meantime.
An acquaintance of mine has cherry shrimp and despite her prefilter the shrimp still end up inside her filter. Amazing, huh? She doesn't seem to mind because it makes it easy to gather shrimp to pack up and sell
Sati wrote:An acquaintance of mine has cherry shrimp and despite her prefilter the shrimp still end up inside her filter. Amazing, huh? She doesn't seem to mind because it makes it easy to gather shrimp to pack up and sell
Now that would suck (no pun intended). I will let y'all know if the prefilter I bought helps or not (it better...).
I get the sponges from powerhead filters (the same as the sponge in the link Mustafa posted) and put them over the intake strainer. It works well for me.
One thing you will need to do is rinse out the sponge often, as if they get clogged the will reduce the flow of the filter. Watch out for baby shrimp before you rinse out the sponge, though. They tend to hang out on the sponges, eating the debris that gets on them.
All right, my Filter-Max #3 came in. This thing is much bigger than I thought it would be. That is great, as the chances of it clogging will be equally much smaller. The intake tube of the Fluval 304 fits snuggly in one of the adapter pieces that comes with the Filter-Max and it all hooks up with minimum effort. I did have to cut quite a bit off of the intake tube to have the pre-filter not touch the gravel, but that's fine.
Time will tell if the sponge is as effective of keeping shrimp out of my filter as the nylon I had on there at first. The probl;em with the nylon is (as many had already predicted) that it becomes clogged quickly and quite effectively. My Fluvals filter rate must've been reduced by a factor 4 at least.
My shrimp are having a grand old time. I have a huge piece of wood in the tank that they seem to enjoy cleaning thorougly. Yesterday I coudl actually find 6 of the 10 in there (I can never find them all at once, as I have too many hiding places).
Alright, I have had my Filter-Max #3 for a while now and it works great. Not a single shrimp has managed to get into my filter (and two of 'em have bellies full of eggs now, but that's besides the point, just very exciting!)
The thing is, without the original intake piece of the fluval attached you do not have the check valve that is build in either. This means that, after cleaning, starting the Fluval 304 has been a pain in the behind. Today, I realized there is a better way to attach this Filter Max thing to my Fluval. I figured I'd share:
1. Attach the Fluval intake straines to the end of your intake (or, technically it is the beginning, I guess)
2. Attach the two elbow pieces to the intake strainer (the main part) of the Filter Max
3. Attach the filter max to the intake of the fluval by inserting the intake strainer straight into the upper elbow piece. The elbow is (just) large enough to fit the strainer inside and it's width fits snuggly around the top of the intake strainer.
The seal between the Filter-Max and the rest is not as tight as the one created by attaching the filter max straight to the piping without the fluval strainer, but that might actually work to your advantage when taking of and cleaning the sponge.
Plus, main reason for doing this, when cleaning the Fluval you don't lose siphon on your intake strainer, and you dont have to pump the little blue handle for half an hour trying to get the air out of the filter and the water in.
To Shrimp&Snails, when my shrimp where sucked up it took a while for us to realize what happened. They must've been in there for the better part of a week. None of them seems to have any ill effects and they actually seemed to do just finein the filter. Other than that I don think you should keep shrimp in that little space, they really don't seem to mind all that much. They are hardy creatures!
