The e1501 is a well made, no-nonsense filter with a decent flow rate and good media capacity. If you have the the newer version (1502) leave the pre-filter foam as it is, set up the bottom tray with coarse, medium and fine pads then fill the remaining trays with the biological media (ideally biohome ultimate) including the 'post-filtering' tray which is thinner than the main trays and located just below the 'pre-filter' tray.
WHAT IS A FULL CYCLE? *If someone tells you the aquarium nitrogen cycle ends with the production of nitrate that is incorrect - please read on* 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 ultimate 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. 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'.
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.
The following videos will be useful to anyone interested in learning more about filtration, bacteria and making the conditions for your fish as good as possible: Sizing a canister properly and filter set up: https://goo.gl/om19un Looking INSIDE different filter media: https://goo.gl/hZWS6c Bacteria and filter media: https://goo.gl/123gAF How to clean an aquarium: https://goo.gl/bPMhvh Aquarium tips / filtration playlist: https://goo.gl/pXgqVj
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.
If you've enjoyed this video please check out the playlists on my channel for hundreds more - on a variety of subjects. Feel free to share or link any of my videos on facebook, twitter, forums etc. for the benefit of anyone you think may also enjoy watching. See you next time. Pondguru
Hello there, welcome back to another edition of Pimp My Filter
and in this episode we're going to be looking
at the Greenline 1501E or E1501 from JBL.
I think the trays are the same size in the 50-01 and the 90-01,
so it should be straightforward.
However, I will still quickly show you
which direction the water flows through this filter,
so if you want to set it up slightly differently,
or entirely differently, at least you know where the water flows.
Remember, these videos are just a suggestion.
You can put whatever foams you want in,
you can put whatever media you want in as well.
Okay, that's our filter there.
And if you've already seen my video
on the 1901 you really don't need to watch this video.
This is just specifically for people who own this filter.
So on there we've got our pump head.
Okay I actually thought this was a new filter that was coming
but this has been running so
I'll bring the camera in to let you have
a look at how it's currently set up.
Okay, so our water comes in, it then goes down through
these side pieces here, which has very coarse foam in.
That is a pre-filter.
It then goes down the side, the outside of the trays,
before rising back up through the trays
and exits through the middle part of this top tray.
So there we've just basically got coarse foam in.
Next tray down.
We've actually got quite a good mix of media in there.
We've got the Sinted Glass Media.
That's the JBL Micromec media.
I actually think that's a little bit too dense. It's got an
extremely small particle size
and it does clog quite quickly but that is...
That is...
It's certainly better than ceramic rings but it's not a perfect one.
And this one, a lot of the
guys in the US will probably recognize this.
This is what you would just basically call lava rock.
It's actually called scoria and it is indeed a lava rock.
Unfortunately a lot
of its internal structure is actually sealed
so most of the useful surface area is on the outside of that
which isn't ideal for an aquarium filter.
You want something a lot more porous than
this and if you check the video description
there is actually a link to a video I've done where we look
inside various types of filter media.
One of them is the scoria,
and you can see just how sealed the inside is.
I know there's a lot of folks really swear by this,
but you can get a lot better media than this.
It's okay, good budget one.
If you haven't got much money,
by all means use that, but it's not perfect.
In fact, I can feel a measurable difference between the weight of that,
and the weight of that, and that.
Both those pieces together are much lighter.
Then this piece, so this piece is obviously much more dense,
there is a hell of a variability
between the different pieces of this so it's not an ideal one
when you're trying to max out a filter.
Right, next tray down we've got a medium density pad
which has got more of the Micromec on top of
it. It's actually pretty clean that as well, that'll do a job.
And underneath that we've got
another medium density pad with the bumps unfortunately
the wrong way up, it should have
It should have been bumpy side down.
Then in the bottom tray we've got coarse foam, one,
two, and we've actually got some more of the micro
mech in the very bottom of here
and that's actually being used as like primary settlement.
So we will reinstate that, well not that particular media
but that idea, we will reinstate that idea
but we'll just use a different sort of media.
I'm actually going to empty all the trays out
apart from this one.
I'm going to take that out and leave those in.
They're the only two foams that we're keeping from this filter.
There you go, that's all the filter media that was in that filter,
and really between the two different types,
it's actually a pretty effective sort of setup, it's not bad at all.
Okay, so we've got four trays in this filter,
the first one is mostly a pre-filter, outside bits there,
but this middle bit can be utilised for media and other things,
and then we've got three trays in the bottom of the filter.
The bottom tray is going to be for our mechanical filtration
and that is simply going to be
coarse, medium and fine foams.
I'll quickly cut them, get them fitted and bring you back.
Oh, before I do that, I'm going to pour some Eheim Micro-Mech,
not Micro-Mech, that's the
JBL media, Eheim Mech.
It's basically a hard ceramic ring, it's very small.
When that goes in the bottom.
It's gonna diffuse the flow all over the place.
So the flow's gonna be really spread out
in the bottom of there.
Without some sort of primary settlement,
The water just comes down from the tank
and then straight up onto the foams.
This settles it down a little bit
and just helps to settle out a little bit of the muck
before it hits the foams,
and that helps to increase our maintenance times.
And by that I don't mean, it doesn't help
to increase how long it actually takes to maintain this thing,
it increases the intervals between the maintenance.
So instead of going one or two months,
it might go three or four months.
And that makes a hell of a difference.
There's maybe half a litre of it in there or something.
Hopefully you can see that through the side.
We've only got about 3 quarters of an inch
or an inch to play with at the bottom there.
Not much.
I really love having square trays
or almost square trays.
You literally just cut four sides, snip the corners off
and that allows your phone to sit in there very nicely.
So we're in our bottom tray.
The water is coming up from the bottom of the filter.
First of all it's hitting a coarse pad bumpy side down
for maximum surface area, then a medium pad
bumpy side down for maximum surface area,
then it's hitting a fine pad to get all of the the fine muck.
That will enable all of our media above here to stay very clean
and that'll enable it to stay effective.
Now if you don't have access to the pads with the bumpy bits on,
don't worry about that.
Just use flat ones. Flat ones work pretty much just as well.
The bonus of the bumpy ones is,
not only do you have quite a lot more contact surface area
to allow for real heavy muck to build up,
but when you have a bumpy pad like that,
and you put another bumpy pad on top of it,
you end up with loads of gaps between the two pads,
because you've got a flat side, and then you've got a bumpy side.
And that traps a hell of a lot of muck.
The void is actually useful.
Right, so that's our bottom tray done.
Pop that in there.
Okay, so we've got two trays filled
with 1.5 kilos each of Biohome Ultimate.
Anybody in the US watching, one kilo is equivalent to 2.2 pounds.
So here we're using about three pounds of media in each tray.
So we didn't go in,
though, to get a well.
And now we're just left with our pre-filter tray.
Remember, water goes down the sides, goes down the sides of the trays,
and then rises back up and exits through the middle of here.
So in the middle of here, we do have room for more filter media.
We can actually fit another kilo of media in here.
So that'll be three plus one.
That'll be four kilos of media in total in here.
Or, we could put about half a kilo
and then we could go with another pad.
You might want to put a carbon pad.
Now that's a carbon impregnated pad.
You could easily put that on the top.
In fact, that's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to finish this off with a carbon pad.
Not only does it look nicer and it's going to make it pack safely
for transport back to Leslie, who sent me this.
Yeah
It's going to give us all three parts of the filtration.
It's going to give us mechanical.
Biological and then chemical.
So we've got everything within one filter.
Right, so we'll drop roughly 500 grams of media in there.
That's about right. And then we'll put our carbon pad on top.
Absolutely beautiful. There you go.
And that is our filter finished.
So now we've got things in the correct order.
We've got the coarse foams on the outside
which will catch a lot of heavy muck.
We've then got the mech in the bottom,
which again will catch heavy muck,
and it'll help to save the foams from taking so much heavy muck.
It comes up through there, hits in the right order,
coarse, medium, and then fine pads.
It then goes through one, two,
and two and a half trays full
of BioHome Ultimate,
which is our biological media, and then it exits through here,
which is a carbon-impregnated pad.
For our chemical filtration.
There you go, that's the job done.
A carbon pimping the filter pumping.
And that's the wrong notes.
Where's my notes on the JBL?
There they are.
Okay we'll just finish off with a few notes
on what the manufacturer says about this
and what I see about this.
We know the JBL filters are good.
I don't really need to tell you how good they are.
They use the space very effectively.
They've got a decent flow rate as well.
This one pumps approximately 1400 litres an hour,
so you are going to get plenty of muck pulled out.
You're going to get a good flow through the filter
and then you're going to get plenty put back to the tank.
Now the manufacturer says the E1501 is for tanks of approximately...
160 to 600 litres and for you guys in the US
that is from 42 US gallons to 158 US gallons.
So if we're talking about the real world filtration,
which is the full cycle, which is really what
we want to be trying to aim for with this,
we don't want to be calling this a nitrate
factory, which is what 99% of canister filters are.
We've set it up not to be a nitrate factory.
So, in the real world, if you didn't bother with that foam in the top,
it would be suitable for roughly 400 litres of a normally stocked tank.
That should provide the full cycle.
And 400 litres is approximately 152 US gallons.
So, it will filter quite a big tank.
If you've got a heavily stocked tank, you can halve that, because it
could take up to 2 kilos per 100 litres to deliver that full cycle.
If you've got something like predators in a tank,
or Malawi cichlids, something that you're feeding a lot.
And they're pooping a lot, so they're producing a lot of waste.
You need more media to cope with more waste.
It's just as simple as that.
So there you go, just a little bit of useful information at the end.
That's fully pimped up now, ready to send back to Leslie.
Thank you very much to him for sending me this up.
And if you've got a filter that you'd like me
to upgrade and take a look at,
please, by all means, get in touch.
My contact details, as always, are in the video description.
Thanks very much for watching, see you next time.
