Pimp My Filter #71 - Eheim Classic 350 Canister Filter Upgrade

Okay, welcome back. In this video, we're going to be taking a look at another canister filter, and it is another one from Eheim. Don't worry, it isn't one of the Pro 4 or Pro 5 series, so you won't hear me swearing. This one is one of the classics in name and also in its stature, in its standing in the aquatic community. These have been around forever. and they're still going strong and they're still going strong because they're built well they hold plenty of media and they're just good honest filters this is the 350 model and it's recommended for tanks between 120 to 350 liters and in gallons that's 31 us gallons to 92 us gallons Quite a spread there. Litres per hour is 620, which is on the low side for, you know, compared to a lot of more modern types of canister filters. And 620 litres is approximately 163 US gallons per hour. Now, this only consumes 15 watts of power, so that is quite low and it is pretty important, especially if you've got multiple tanks. If you don't need to shift a lot of water, but you still want something that's going to hold plenty of media, that's a good option, especially if you've got multiple filters, because with electric prices being as crazy as they are, every watt counts. And as far as the head goes, and that is how high it'll pump to, that's 1.8 meters, which is roughly six feet. That actually seems pretty good considering the size of the pump, 620 litre an hour pump, six foot head, that's pretty good so you've got the efficiency of the pump and you've got a decent head. Now on the back of the box there's a couple of different suggested setups, one of which is all foams, the other one is a few foams, media and a fine pad. Obviously, the fine pad is in totally the wrong place, which is at the top. That just concentrates all the crap in your media and makes it less efficient. I'll pull it out. I'll show you which way this one came set up. And then we'll change it somewhat to make it more efficient. Actually, a hell of a lot more efficient. Not that there's anything wrong with foams, mind you, because foams will support a reasonable amount of bacteria, especially if you pack out. you know a filter of this size with reasonably coarse foams there's a lot of surface area in there especially compared to you know cheap crappy ceramic rings so if you had a choice of packing this out with ceramic rings or the coarse pads that come with it i would say go for the coarse pads and i think i may have forgotten to thank matthew who sent me this at the start of the video so if I forgot then thank you very much Matthew for sending me this So, many of you will be familiar with this filter, but if you aren't, we have an inlet in the bottom, that would normally be curved like a 90 degree swept bend, unfortunately that fitting didn't come in the box when this arrived, water goes up through all the media and through your foams, whatever else you put in here, pump sits in here, pump pumps water back to your tank. These actually make a pretty good pre-filter. Certainly better than the standard ones you can get which are like you know 15 or 20 quid or something because they hold so much more stuff. You know if you just put coarse pads in there say and had your water being drawn out of your tank into here through all those pads and then out into another canister filter full of media that would be a really effective and efficient system. Plus these are so easy to get into. And while these clips might seem small, they're well made and they're strong and they do the job of holding on this pump head. Your pump's in here, that's where it draws water from so obviously this is a bottom up filter. And on the top here you've got a little divider just to stop any media or bits of foam or anything getting drawn into the impeller and knacking it. And this is how it came You've got Fine pad on the top which as you know is the wrong place to have it because it concentrates all the crap in here and then you've just got a series of coarse foams with a small carbon pad randomly inserted in there as well so we'll get all these lads out and that arrived with the filter now you've got to forgive me I didn't actually look up to see what that was but judging by the bits of glue and If it's a pad that's stuck on there, I would imagine that that was at one time full of carbon. It's good that that's being included because we are going to use that. So that's all the sponges out. Put those to one side. And as you can see, in the bottom, we've got another one of those dividers. That just maintains a void in here. So when the water comes in from your tank, it swirls around in the bottom and then it goes up through your foams. Suppose you could put a few ceramic rings in there, but personally, I wouldn't bother. Because the water comes from the bottom up, all we need in there really is a coarse pad. And you can then go with a medium one and fine if you want. I'm just going to jump straight to the fine. So I want to maximise how much media fits in here, given that Matthew wants to use this in a 210 litre tank, I think. So that's coarse and then fine. And then we'll go with that little carbon pad. So in the bottom quarter of the filter, we've got our mechanical filtration and our chemical filtration. Beyond that, all we need is the biological filtration. And to maximise the amount of surface area we're going to get in here, I'm going to be using those which are 300 gram bags of the bio gravel. Now you can buy them ready packed like that on the Filter Pro site or you can just get the bags separately and the media separately or of course you can just use whatever media you want but I would advise that you use it in mesh bags it makes them really easy to take out. When you're maintaining the filter all you would do you would just lift these out, stick them in a bucket of water that you've drained from the tank, give them a bit of a shake. And stick them back in that's all you need to do to clean that media and it'll last indefinitely. Now on top of the carbon pad we're going to use this thing which came with this particular filter just place that on there it doesn't go right across but what it will do will prevent the fine pad from getting crushed too much by the media it just kind of spreads the weight a little bit and then in there we just pile the media in. Now you're always going to get little gaps up the side of the bags but because you're building this up in layers just stick the next one over that gap and it'll force the water through the bags of media and it'll all be good. There you go again we've got a couple of gaps there we'll just cross that gap with the next level and that has packed that out to the perfect height of this lip and that's where our head sits on. Then the head goes on Like that, and you can just hear the media bags just being squashed down a little bit when that goes on. That tells us that it's the perfect height. So there we go. Now that is a pretty heavy filter, and there's a lot of media in there. Now, as always, you're not stuck to using that particular media. That was the bio gravel in the small mesh bags. Just use whatever you want. I'm just using something that's going to be ridiculously effective and has a massive surface area. So in there we've got 2.4 kilos in total, 2.4 kilos is 5.3 pounds so Matthew was going to be using this on a 210 litre tank that yeah 2.4 kilos is going to be spot on for that as long as the stock isn't heavy and that should easily give him a full cycle which is zero ammonia, zero nitrite and very low nitrate. This particular setup makes this filter Suitable for a tank of around 240 litres or 63 US gallons for a normal stock or half that for a heavy stock. And a heavy stock would include things like goldfish, discus, cichlids, like breeding tanks or marine tanks because the marine water, well, it's not as conducive to bacteria growth, so you would go over the top with the filtration. So for a heavy stock, I'd recommend this particular filter with this setup. for around 120 liters or 31 us gallons so again eheim's recommendation for the actual tank size which would be towards the lower end of their estimate is entirely not accurate but but entirely realistic nothing's ever 100% accurate it's like when i give recommendations for the bio home i say that one kilo is suitable for 100 liters that's for a normal stock and that's 26 us gallons you can halve that for a heavy stock but every tank's different so those figures are just based on Tens of thousands of bits of feedback from all over the world. Every tank's different. Some tanks may take more, some tanks may take less. It'll certainly take more if you're using certain conditioners which starve the bacteria. Try and avoid anything that claims to bind, detoxify or remove ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. They've got binding agents in which basically takes that food away from the bacteria. So instead of this being absolutely ram-packed with bacteria, you might end up operating at 40-50% efficiency. Your cycle will take ages to get going and you probably will never see a full cycle. So just use a normal conditioner with any tank. Something that simply makes the water safe for life and doesn't claim to fanny about with the ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. As soon as you introduce so-called science into nature, it makes an arse of it try and keep things as natural as possible and really that's what i've done with the recommendation for the media there that media is the most receptive to bacteria because it's basically just made from sand powdered glass and a few selected trace elements which are all fused together in a kiln the internal structure of it is absolutely perfect for bacteria to colonize and it'll last indefinitely you know so going forward All you'll need to replace in this filter with any sort of regularity is your carbon pad, if you choose to use a carbon pad, ideally you'd swap that out every seven or eight weeks because the active carbon doesn't stay active for very long, and the fine pad which depending on your tank and how much muck's being produced. You might change that once a month, you might change it once every two or three months. The coarse pad or medium pad, if you choose to use a medium as well, you can just keep rinsing those out until they start to degrade, go floppy or shrink. So you might get, I don't know, a year, 18 months out of those pads quite easily. So there you go, El Clasico has been upgraded. Thanks again to Matthew for sending me this. Thanks to you guys for watching. Check out the other videos. If you haven't already subscribed, you might want to subscribe, you might want to share it if you think anybody might benefit from seeing this video. If so, you have my undying gratitude. Thanks for watching, I'll see you next time.