Pimp My Filter #57 - Eheim 2260 / 1500XL Canister Filter Upgrade

Ey up there welcome back to another edition of Pimp My Filter and in this edition I'm going to be taking a look at a filter that I've always wanted to feature in this series but at the same time haven't wanted to feature in this series because I know it's going to cost me a fortune in filter media to fill it up. Welcome to the worst day of my life and the best day of my life this is the Eheim Heim, classic. 2260. Also known as the 1500 XL. Now this costs around about 300 English Pounds. Probably is around about, I don't know, 310, 330 Euros. In US dollars? I've no idea, I don't know. Check out the link in the video description, I'll put the filter in that along with anything else of interest. This is a filter that's been around for a lot of years and it's not readily available, it's not available everywhere, but you still can find it available from new and you can still get spares for versions of these going back right to the dawn of time. Eheim are very good with replacement parts. Now this doesn't come with anything in it apart from two dividers. One that goes in the bottom of the filter, one that goes in the top of the filter. So in the bottom of the filter you'd have your foams, normally a coarse pad and a medium pad, a rest with media and then a fine pad on the top. As you know the top For a fine pad, if the water's flowing up is the worst place for it because it just concentrates all the heavy muck in your good porous media, prematurely clogging it and reducing efficiency. Um... So with these types of filters, getting the fine pad in the right place, which is nearer the bottom of the filter, just above your coarse and medium pad, is more difficult. I have had people tell me not to bother running a fine pad because you have such a big contact surface area, you can get away with a medium and a coarse. That sounds like a good idea because the last thing you want is the fine pad being crushed by the weight of the media, and believe me, there's going to be some weight of media in here. But you could do it another way by buying an extra one of the upper dividers, which I have actually done. So after all that's Slava. Let's get the filter on the bench and I'll show you how it works and how we're going to set it up. Remember you can set this thing up however you want, you know, share your stories with how you've set yours up in the video description, other people will find that useful. In this video we're just going to set this up with, you know, good quality foams and a great quality media which will be the Biohome Ultimate. I might put something else in as well just to increase the The overall anaerobic side of things, because this filter says it's suitable for up to 1,500 litres. That's a bold claim, so the more media we can get in there, the more surface area, the better, but we don't really want to impede the flow, because this has a flow rate of 2,400 litres an hour, and that equates to 635 US gallons per hour. It is a beast of a pump. Now, ordinarily the pump would be mounted like that, so the outlet was on the top. But Oliver, who sent me this, didn't have room in his cabinet to take a pipe out of the top of the pump. So he's turned it on its side. This little plate slides off and it'll slide into these grooves. It'll allow you to basically put it wherever you want. Um... And it does have a fitting here, which allows it to go to here. I'll connect it up and I'll explain more. So that is what comes with it. It's basically an elbow. One bit screws into the intake on your pump and the other bit screws on to the top of the filter, so that sucks the water out the top, blows it out here. Obviously you've got like little quick release things and taps and so on on here on the outlet and also on the inlet. Right, we've got clips on the top of here, almost like little G-clamps. You just tighten up, keep this on, slacken off to take this off. As you can see, the water's drawn through there into your pump intake. Okay, in the bottom of here, we've got a thick plastic grid, little legs on. That creates quite a big void. It's probably about two inches deep. If you had any really big ceramic rings, you could certainly fill that void under there. Don't think I've got any big rings left, but God, you could get. Probably is the best part of two kilos of ceramic rings in there if you wanted to put them in there. If you didn't want to put them in there probably wouldn't be a bad idea just to leave that as a void because bear in mind you've got the bottom drain. That'll drain out a lot easier if that is just left as a void so you might just have to sacrifice a bit of space for ease of cleaning. Then you've got nothing. Then you've got another plastic divider which would sit on top of your With your media or on top of your forms or whatever. And that would create the void between your filter parts and where the water gets drawn in, just so it wasn't sucking any bits of media or anything like that in, you know. That is actually a new one that I've bought and it's lucky I did because this one that Oliver sent up actually arrived broken. One of these little legs got smashed off. It doesn't really matter though because I'm actually going to cut those legs off and use this one as a divider between Between the forms. and the media, so really you're going to have foams sitting on top of that one being sandwiched between that divider and this divider and then you're going to have media on top of there and your top grid sitting on the top of whatever it is you've got on the top whether it's foams or media chemical filtration or whatever so i'm going with a three divider system normally obviously it would only have two all right i'll fire up the dremel dremel dremel dremel dremel I'll fire up the Dremel. And I'll cut these off just so they're not interfering with any foams or any media. That's going to be our middle divider. I won't video that because it'll be noisy. Okay so I've got the foams cut to go in here. Now ordinarily Eheim would suggest that you put their mech in here which is like a ceramic ring. I can kind of see the reasoning for that because foams I mean, even those, you know, that takes up two inches. You could get quite a lot of mechanical small rings in the bottom of there, which would trap a canny bit of muck, so that's definitely an option. I'll just put those down there. You can see very well it's just like a black hole, but there's two foams in the bottom of there. They're the coarse ones. Then we're going to go with a medium, and I'm just wondering whether to make that the only mechanical filtration. That's still giving us three inches of mechanical filtration. I have cut another one, I'm not sure I can see the point in putting that in though, it's going to take up another inch in here, that will probably be enough. Right, that goes in, that's our intermediary grid and that'll make sure that the foams are depressed evenly, so you're not going to get any one place where the foams are squashed down. Ready to rock and roll. Yeah, there's not much free space in there. Although, you probably could get some... packets of carbon or something in the top of there if you felt the need to do so. It's about as packed as it's going to get. Okay let's get that screwed on and then I shall give you my final thoughts. Right so that's 11 kilos of various types of bio home media in here. That's a hell of a lot. That equates to about 23 pound in weight for you guys in the US. You probably could get more in though in truth if you use the bag that Eheim sent with this filter and I'll show you that now. So that's the bag that Eheim send with the filter. Hasn't got a draw cord or anything at the top though which is a bit of a bummer but even so it's quite a strong bag and you'd easily get 13 to 14 kilos if you wanted to go with the media in one bag. I'm not really a fan of that though. All it takes is for you to catch it on something when you take it out, rip it, media all over the floor. Plus 14 kilos is a hell of a weight to lift up. If you're using crappy ceramic rings it doesn't really matter because they're not gonna hold on to the water like the biohome does. But good media is gonna be a lot to lift out in one go. So maybe save this bag for when you're fly fishing and the midges are biting. As far as my thoughts on this filter go, It's been around for a lot of years. As far as I'm aware the design hasn't changed that much. They might have upgraded the pumps a few times and you can add bigger pumps to the top of here, believe it or not. So it's a hell of a filter. And as far as media holding capacity goes it's the equivalent of more than two FX6s, which is what a lot of people would use in, you know, big predator tanks, marine tanks, big discus tanks, you know, big tanks in general. You've got one filter that does the job of multiple filters. And to me that makes it a pretty good buy. There's not much can go wrong with it. The pump goes wrong, it's so accessible you can just take it off and of course this does come with like a shroud thing that goes on the top just sits on the top to make it look neat. That resulted in this actually being a little bit too big for Oliver's cabinet so I told him just to leave that part at home. So if you're looking at like an image search or you click the link in the description you'll see them with the top on. So this one would have ordinarily had a top one. It doesn't need it on though, it's purely cosmetic. To me this filter is much better than the modern range of the Eheim filters. Pro 2s were good, big chunky solid honest filters. Pro 3s again pretty good. Pro 4s they started to get a bit cheap and tacky with the plastic. Pro 5 If I'm honest, I haven't had a look at them. I don't think they're an improvement over the Pro 4 by all accounts though, but they have Wi-Fi. What the hell you would need Wi-Fi for on anything other than a phone or something like that is beyond me. Everything seems to be Wi-Fi enabled now. And just remember, my friends, in time, all these Wi-Fi things are going to be spying on us. So go for something old school like this. It is a classic. I mean, it is called a classic and it is a classic. It's just a big beast and I hope Oliver is pleased with what it's managed to fit in. 11 kilos of media makes it suitable for roughly 1100 litres if you want a full cycle. If it's a heavily stocked tank, which I think it is, you can halve that down to about 550 litres if you want to see a full cycle. Of course using those bags of bio gravel all packed in could boost the anaerobic activity within that mesh bag. Which might increase the potential of having a full cycle but time will tell. Normally you couldn't fit all that bio gravel in the mesh bag into a filter but this one, whoa you just had a great big line of them you know. I suppose I could have even put another couple in the middle but it's good to have a mix of media. You've got various pore sizes, you've got various conditions within here and the more varied the structure and available tunnels you know. environments that is on and in your filter media, the better chance you have of cultivating all sorts of bacteria, aerobic and anaerobic. It'll just be a breeding ground for good beneficial bacteria and that'll absolutely hammer the ammonia, nitrite and nitrates. So thanks again to Oliver who sent me this. I'm sure my accountant will love it when I try and write the cost of this media off. But at least we've got this one ticked off the list. I think, as far as I know, this is the biggest canister filter that I'm going to have to do in this series. So everything from here won't cost me as much. I'm just glad I've got it in the series now. It's a beast. And I'll get it packaged up and sent back to Oliver. If you're in the UK and you've got a filter that you want me to take a look at, please phone me up or send an email. My details are in the video description. I tend not to see comments because Google doesn't send me any notifications. Don't send a text. I never ever look at texts, Whatsapp, well I haven't got that, Instagram, all that sort of nonsense. I just cannot see comments or anything on there. Just email me or phone me. Phone is best. And I'll be able to quickly tell you if what you want me to take a look at has already been done or is already in the can, so to speak, because I do have probably still 15 to 20 filter videos that need editing and uploading. There is still a lot out there that I haven't taken a look at with the series. And when I first started the series, I did start it with the aim. of covering as many as I can. If I can get to a hundred episodes of this series and do a hundred different filters, I'll be happy. I'll be poor, but I'll be happy because when people phone me up asking about how much a specific filter will hold, hopefully it'll be something that I've done, I'll be familiar with it and I'll be able to better advise them. So really that's what it's all about. It's obviously me sharing what I find with the filters but... From a selfish point of view, it's me wanting to increase my own knowledge on filters, so that I can quickly and efficiently help people who are wanting media to fill their own filters. Thanks for watching, see you next time.