The Superfish Hang On 200 is a slimline hang on the back filter which uses a cartridge system which can be repurposed to free up space inside the filter for biological media. In the video I got approx. 900g / 2 lb of Biogravel into the filter either in 3 x 300g mesh bags or 1 x 900g mesh bag - that makes the filter suitable for tanks of up to 100 litres / 26 US gallons for a normal stock or half that for a heavy stock (if the goal is to achieve a FULL cycle). The plastic used for the filter is very similar to thick 'Tupperware' plastic and is not brittle like some HOB filters. Even the pipes and other fittings use the same plastic so there is little danger of breaking it.
A full cycle is completed by bacteria - the aerobic part of biological filtration which processes ammonia to nitrite and nitrite to nitrate followed by an anaerobic part which processes nitrate into soluble nitrogen which bubbles off to the atmosphere. Therefore it requires a suitable amount of excellent quality filter media to be able to provide the environment for both aerobic AND anaerobic bacteria - that is what Biohome filter media does perfectly but even with such good media there are limitations and we recommend the following amounts for different stocking scenarios: (1 US Gallon = 3.8 litres) (1kg = 2.2 lbs) Average community tropical aquarium = 1kg per 100 litres Average coldwater aquarium = 1kg - 1.5kg per 100 litres Predator aquarium = 1.5kg - 2kg per 100 litres Large cichlid aquarium = 1.5kg - 2kg per 100 litres Malawi / Tanganyikan aquarium = 1.5kg - 2kg per 100 litres Marine aquarium = 1.5kg - 2kg per 100 litres Average mixed fish pond = 1kg per 200 litres Average koi pond = 1kg per 150 litres
You may be disagreeing with the above figures but remember that they are for a FULL CYCLE not half a job - achieving 0 ammonia and 0 nitrite is quite easy since aerobic bacteria grows freely on any surface but the anaerobic bacteria responsible for COMPLETING the cycle needs more a specialized habitat. Remember to use a water conditioner which does not bind / detoxify ammonia, nitrite or nitrate as that type of conditioner will severely limit bacteria numbers by starving the bacteria of 'food'. Size a filter properly, set it up sensibly and you will have perfect water - it's that simple....and your filter won't be the dreaded 'Nitrate factory'.....you'll spend less money on treatments too......basically the filter is the foundation of a successful aquarium.
This series of videos is all about trying to squeeze more efficiency out of internal and external aquarium filters which generally have a limited filtering capacity - If you have a filter you'd like me to feature in a video then please contact me on: [email protected] 07772848730 (Richard) Anyone who sends a filter (UK only at present) will have it upgraded and returned to them for free and the only cost you will pay is how much it costs to ship it to me - I'm helping to boost your filter and the resulting videos will hopefully be useful to viewers all over the world so it's a win/win.
This channel is purely a hobby for me so I will never ask viewers to donate money for any of my projects or charge anyone for information - information should be shared freely and I certainly don't consider myself an 'expert' in anything I pursue as a hobby so please do your own research, never accept anything as 'fact', reject anyone claiming to be some sort of authority or 'expert' and make your own minds up about anything you wish to study.
Some of the links above may be to my affiliate programs on Amazon and Ebay so they will throw a few pennies my way if you make a purchase - it costs you nothing extra and helps towards keeping the lights on in my bunker.
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Video Summary
AI Generated
This video provides a detailed guide on modifying the Superfish Hang-On Filter 200 to improve its efficiency and sustainability. By replacing expensive, proprietary cartridges with custom biological media and implementing a pre-filtration system, users can enhance water quality, increase biological capacity, and eliminate the recurring cost of manufacturer-branded replacements.
As with all my videos there is a lot
of important information in the video description and in the
pinned comment. There's phone numbers, emails,
all that sort of thing. There's also links to
anything that we're going to be talking about
in this video including the filter. Hello there,
welcome back to another edition of Pimp My Filter
and in this particular video we're
going to be taking a look at another hang on the back filter,
this time from Superfish.
And this particular model is the Superfish Hang-On Filter 200,
and you can probably guess from the name that this particular filter
is recommended by the manufacturer for tanks up to 200 litres,
or 52 US gallons.
So that's our filter there.
Let's set up how it would be from the manufacturer,
with everything that comes with it.
So we've got an intake pipe here, which is adjustable,
goes down a little bit further than it's set there.
That's not the easiest to do with one hand,
but there you go.
So you've got quite a long inlet pipe.
Normally, you would put a lump of foam
or something over that, like coarse foam,
just to stop any small fish going in there,
and also to give you a bit of initial filtration
to stop the main part of the filter
clogging up with so much muck.
Then as this pipe comes up, we've got a T-piece here,
and that has a floating intake to act as a skimmer.
So it draws water from the top.
And also from halfway down your tank.
That all seems good but it's got something on the back of here
which I think may be a bit of a problem.
Hopefully you'll be able to see there.
There's actually slits in the back of this tee piece
so it will draw water in here all the time
which will reduce how much it draws in here.
That to me seems very strange and you can't block that off.
A bit of a bummer.
Well, I say you can't block it off,
you can block it off because that's what I've done.
I mean, you get to seal it with silicone,
you put a bit of tape over it or something.
But I can't understand why it just doesn't have like
a little slidey thing there to cap that off.
Well, actually, I can't even understand why it's there
in the first place, if I'm being brutally honest.
Moving further up the pipe, we've got a little tap here,
which controls how much water the pump can draw in,
and therefore how much water will ultimately come out of the filter.
So the water goes up.
Along there. That's your pump
which is 450 liters per hour or 118 US gallons per hour.
Not very big but it doesn't really have to be.
It's not pumping water up to any great height
like it would from a canister filter
so it doesn't really need to be overpowered.
And then from there the water feeds up inside
the filter to an elbow joint and it goes through
these three cartridges. Now the 100 version
of this filter comes with two cartridges which makes
me think that the 200 should actually come
with four cartridges if it's meant to do twice as much
but it doesn't. It comes with three and I'll pull this apart
and show you what's in those cartridges
Before I do, I'll just show you this.
There's these little plastic button
things that you push into the bottom
and they get a really good tight fit.
And they just allow you to set the distance between here and your tank
so that this sits perfectly up and down
when it actually hangs on the back of the tank.
This plastic is very similar to Tupperware sort of plastic
like you'd get in bait boxes and so on.
Which is fine because it allows for a little bit of movement.
It's not brittle.
It's actually pretty well made and the top is more
or less just like a Tupperware sort of box top as well.
That just slots on the top
and we'll need that off to take a look inside, that's it.
Okay so the idea is that these cartridges would just be replaced
every so often
because they've got carbon in and although they're sealed you can
actually get into them to put your own stuff
in which I'll demonstrate in a moment.
So that's the main filtering part. As you can see, it's pretty narrow.
I think it's only about seven centimetres or just under three inches,
so that's very slimline.
That's going to allow you to get your tank right up, well,
almost right up to the wall instead of keeping it way off
like you would have to do with some hang-on-the-back filters.
Now, the idea behind these is that each one of these acts independently
but together, so the water gets pumped in here.
It's going to be easier to see when I pull it apart,
but it goes through the top bit, but it also goes through
a coarse foam, which is in the middle of each particular section,
and then on the outsides you've got a fine pad,
so it bleeds out into the filter from the inside out.
And the coarse pad inside of here is a carbon impregnated pad
and the carbon will stay active
for seven or eight weeks so really if you want
to keep on top of the filter you've got to replace
these every two months
which you know given the cost of them will get expensive eventually so
we're going to try and rectify that with what we're going
to do but first of all I'm going
I'm going to take one of these off.
And there's little clips all the way around here,
which are a bit awkward to get off,
but I'll take this plate off
and I'll show you exactly what's in here.
The more times you take this plate off,
the easier it will be to take it off.
So what I'm gonna propose later will get a lot easier.
Really, you need something pretty solid
like a knife
or a pair of scissors.
Gently have a go at these end three here.
Really you just gently prise this off that's it.
Once you get like the end three clips undone
it becomes very easy to get the rest, see.
Right, that's it off and obviously that can go on
and off as many times as you want
so what I'm saying is you don't need to buy these
full replacement things if you don't want
too, you can put your own stuff in here.
But unfortunately because the water kind of flows through
this cavity it does go through all of the things together
so it's not as if you can put like a coarse pad in one, a medium pad
in the other, then filter media in the other one, can't really work like
that which is a bit of a bummer.
So we'll just lift this out and that's basically what we've got
it's almost like a, I don't know, it's like some ice cream sandwich
or something, but we've got fine pad on top
and bottom and the carbon impregnated pad.
In the middle that's what the water hits first
then it bleeds out through the fine pad and by the time it gets back
to the tank the water should be really really clean
but there's not much in here for anything biological.
So what I'm going to do I'm going to take all
the factory installed stuff out of here to leave me
with an empty tray and you may, you know
if you're following along with this at home you may as well
keep these because you never know
when you might want to add a fine pad, say you get a
bacterial bloom or something you want to catch it
or you get some very fine muck, it's useful
to keep if you ever need it
and with regard to the carbon you may as well keep that as well.
you know what I'm going to do in here in a minute, can easily
be swapped out and put this stuff back
in and if you get a new piece of bog wood
and you get staining in the water by all means just swap
out, what I'm going to put in here for the carbon pad
and that should draw in the color from the
bog wood or any residual treatments after
treating fish, I think that was the one I
pulled apart yesterday, that one
was much easier, now we've got three empty compartments
And what you're probably thinking is
that I'm gonna fill this with filter media
and put it back inside the filter, but I'm not.
There is a possibly better or certainly alternative place
to put these, which I'll explain in a moment.
What we're gonna put in here is just coarse pads.
Now these are the ones that I've got on the website.
They've got the bumpy bits on the
outside and if we wanted them
in a restricted space we'd put them bumpy to bumpy and squash
them in. But there is enough room to put them
back to back and put them in that way. So that
gives you the maximum contact surface area on the outer sides.
And you'll be thinking why is
it on the outer sides? Because this bleeds
from the inside out but it doesn't have to.
I think I forgot to thank the lad
who sent me this and this confused me greatly because the
previous video I did the guy that sent it to me was called Ross
and this fella is actually called
Ross as well but they're different Rosses
so thank you very much Ross for sending me this.
Okay so we have our empty filter and instead
of the normal intake on here we're going to attach
this and you can move
these around so you can draw
from different places
in the tank that is now our intake
And as I mentioned at the very start,
normally on the intake, you would put a block of coarse foam.
But what I've done here is fill all of these with coarse foam.
So this is gonna catch pretty much all the muck
that's gonna be drawn out of your tank.
And instead of it ending up in here in the filter,
where it's gonna clog things up
and require this thing to be emptied out and cleaned,
all you're gonna have to do is just pull that off
strip these down, clean them,
put them back together and whack that back on the bottom.
And the doubly beautiful thing about this system is,
if you didn't want all those foams in your
tank, just take those ones off, goes back on,
so now you've got two coarse pads to catch your muck.
You could set this one up with your choc ice type scenario
with the carbon pad and the fine pads
and bang that one in there to catch all the fine muck
and do your chemical filtration.
And that would leave you approximately half
of the filter to put biological media in.
That's pretty much got everything you need
if you wanted to set it up like that.
So that's another option with this filter.
The only thing is though, if you're using
one of these, you would probably have to block off
that end because the water would just shoot straight out of it.
So you block that end off
and the water would be forced to go through your foams
and out of each side of this.
Right so that's our intake
and possible chemical extension sorted if we chose to sacrifice one of
those. For maximum biological filtration we go
with those on the intake and
again we've got a couple of options for inside
of here with regard to filter media.
These are 300 gram bags of bio gravel.
Bio gravel which is made from the same stuff as the bio home
ultimate and other forms of bio home.
It's basically an exceptionally porous gravel
made from sand and powdered glass
and put in a kiln and it just creates a perfect
environment. I mean each one
of these is just like a mini deep sand bed but
It's like a deep sand bed in a totally safe environment.
You get aerobic and anaerobic activity
in these types of media, in the bio home media.
Because of the limited space,
cannot put really bigger forms of media in here.
The bio gravel
does fit in pretty
well in these bags
though.
So that is about 900 grams or roughly two pounds
of media inside of here.
Which for something of this size is pretty impressive
and the surface area in there because
of the media we've used will be off the scale.
So water will be cleaned before it gets in here.
Apart from what is taken off the top obviously,
so what I would suggest with any sort of skimmer
attachment is that for five or ten minutes
when you feed the fish you just turn the pump off.
That will allow all the food to get eaten
and not just drawn straight into the skimmer.
And put into the filter,
because that would kind of negate what we're trying to do by
cleaning the water before it gets to the biological media.
So that's about 900 grams of media in here,
or approximately two pounds, making this filter
suitable for a tank of around about, well,
up to 100 litres, or 26 US gallons, if it's
Half that if it's normally stocked,
or half that if it's heavily stocked.
Now if you did choose to use one of these cartridges
in here for your chemical filtration,
you could simply take that first bag out
and you'd still be left with about
600 grams of the bio media.
Still quite a lot of media and certainly a hell of a lot more
than what comes with it
because there's really very little there to cater for
for biological action
for your bacteria you know you'll get more bacteria living in one
bag of this than you will in the entirety
of the rest of the filter and your tank
really does hold a lot of bacteria
so we'll take those out i'll show you another option
Instead of using three separate little bags
of media you could use one big one. This is one of the larger bags.
I sell these on the website. Normally they'd have a kilo in.
I had to take a little bit out to get it to fit in here
and there's just over 900 grams again in here.
That fits in there pretty well,
it really packed it out and the beauty of that is it
sits a little bit lower than those three separate bags
so you could go with a bit of medium pad
over the top.
In fact if we turn that little rubbery fitting around on the inside,
yes that's it, like so it'll fire the water
around this open area through the media
Up through the foam and back out.
Some of the water will go on top of here.
So any of the solids that float, i.e. what would normally get caught
in the skimmer, would end up in that pad.
Again, that would keep your media pretty clean as well.
If you want to clean the foam,
just whip that out, clean it, stick it back.
If you want to clean the media, you just wait until
you drain some water off during a normal water change.
And you just give that a bit of a shake in the bucket of tank water.
That'll get any muck off and then just slap it straight back in here.
So there you go that's turned something
which long term would cost a fortune to maintain
into something that initially you know may
cost well I don't know one of those bags
16, 17 quid or something and a little bit of foam.
Doesn't cost much to upgrade
but it'll save you fortunes in the long run and
It offers you so much more filtration than how it comes
from the manufacturer.
Sorry Superfish. To be fair,
it isn't just Superfish that do these replaceable cartridges
and all that. It seems to be something
that every aquatic manufacturer does. They'll sell
a filter cheap, and in this case I think
this one's around about £25 English pounds. They'll
sell the filter cheap but they'll make
the money month after month after month when you come back
Come back for these cartridges.
I've kind of stopped that revenue stream
so again I do apologize but my commitment is to the actual
person who's keeping the fish not the people selling the filters.
So that offers you a great
filtration for a tank of around about 100 liters if normally stocked
or 26 US gallons
because of the relatively limited flow rate from this hang on the back.
It would be good for the likes of a guppy tank you know things
that don't like a lot of water
movement or a lot of surface agitation
or if you had things like butterfly fish, a discus tank,
a quarantine tank where the fish don't want
to be thrown around all over the place. Actually a
quarantine tank would be a cracking place for it
because it wouldn't take up much room, it would
offer you incredible filtration and it wouldn't disturb the fish.
Thanks again to Ross for sending
It looks a little bit Frankenstein,
but it's going to do a hell of a job.
I'm very glad to have taken a look at this,
because I wasn't even aware of this one,
and the fact that all these bits fit together is really, really good.
Just a note on the little slits at the back of this T-piece.
I think I mentioned at the start, but if not,
you could just fill those with a bit of aquarium silicon,
put a bit of tape over there,
and then it would ensure that all the water would be dragged in,
either through your foams or through your skimmer.
All in all, a good,
cheap and pretty high capacity filter once it gets upgraded.
I've used the bio gravel, obviously you're free
to just use whatever you want,
I'm just throwing ideas out there.
Thanks for watching, I shall see you in the next video.
Yeah, it's definitely not the end
of the world to take these off
and it does get easier.
