Pimp My Filter #9 - Aqua One Aquastyle 980 Trickle Filter

Hello there welcome back again this is another episode of Pimp My Filter. Now normally I would have the filter just down here and I'd lift it up and say this is what we're going to be taking a look at but this one is so damn long I'm going to have to go into the next room and get it. Okay that is our filter roughly a yard it was just less than a yard or just less than a meter wide and there's two versions of the 980 tank there's a 980 and a 980T. And will it work hard enough to keep the fish happy and healthy? Well, let's take a look at it. I'll bring the camera in, let you have a look. Right, now you'd normally have a pump sitting in your tank underneath here, which would pump water through here, go through the spray bar, and it would actually go through all of these trays at the same time, contain various things. So we shower through here and go out the slits in the bottom into this gutter sort of thing here and back out to your tank. Well there's all sorts of stuff in here. That actually feels like the Aqua One rings which are actually a pretty good ceramic ring. A lot of ceramic rings are awful quality but the Aqua One ones are pretty good so if you are going to go for a ceramic ring, that's a good one from Aqua One. So we've got four bags of those. We've got a random block of foam with a coarse foam on the top. In the next section, I've got a very big bag of carbon. The size of that, you certainly don't need all of that. And in the next section we've got again coarse foam and just some random foams. These are actually off an air driven filter and that's a pretty good foam. You know you get a lot of mechanical action and also quite a lot of bacterial action in there as well because it's quite a fine foam. So you know that's not a bad choice but we can do better. We'll get the spray bar out the way and the lids out the way. And I'll take these trays out and lay them here so you can see everything that's happening. So we've got a big long tray, a little stubby tray, and another big long tray. Let's get this out the way as well. Okay, this is a really, really easy setup. Overhead filters are exceptionally simple, very, very easy to maintain, especially seeing as you can just lift the lid off and you're straight into the foams. Um, and with the right media, they're actually very, very efficient, they're just good filters, just very good filters, a lot of people don't bother with these on the big Aqua One tanks, but they should, you know, there's a lot of folks just empty these out completely and put an external filter on, but you can get a lot of... biological action and also easily enough mechanical action in these three trays. Now when this comes from Aqua One you've got the coarse foam over your media but then on top of that you've got like cartridges which have a fine pad and carbon in them and that's actually on the top that's the way that Aqua One tell you to set them up but what happens when you do it that way is water comes through the spray bar It falls down, it hits a fine pad first, so it just clogs it up straight away. And you get the water overflowing the sides. Um, um, That's a problem for two reasons. First of all is, you get a sealed effect on the top, so the water's just flowing straight over the top. You need to maintain them all the time because of that. And these things are quite expensive to buy. I'm assuming that's why there's none of these cartridges with this filter, because this has been running at some point. Those cartridges are expensive. And you don't need them. If you did choose to use the cartridges, however, they would go underneath the coarse foam, so the water hit the coarse foam first, and then it hit the fine pad, and then it hit the carbon, and then it hit your media. It's a slightly cockeyed way of doing it, but it's certainly better than having the fine pad on the top. Right, we're not gonna actually be using these coarse pads, so we'll take those out. We're not gonna be using the media. We'll take that out. We're not gonna be using the carbon. I'll take that out as well, and we're not going to be using these. I am, however, going to leave all that stuff there, because I'm going to give that back to Dawn, who sent me the filter, just in case she doesn't like what I do. She can put it back exactly how it was. So that gives us three empty trays. Now, obviously, we're going to put filter media in here. We're going to go with Biohome Ultimate. So I'll fill all those trays up until they're about an inch to inch and a quarter off the top, and then I'm just going to put one foam. I'm not going to put a fine pad because that's going to clog up pretty quick. I'm not going to put a coarse pad because then that means we've got to put a fine pad underneath. I'm going to go for one that's between the two. That's a medium density pad and really that is going to catch very fine muck. It's going to catch coarse muck as well and it's not going to clog up very quickly. See the dimples on the top? When the water falls into there, it has a lot of surface area to hit. Now if you did have a fine pad I suppose you could put that underneath if you've got space but I want to maximise the space for biological media. I'm sure this foam will be good enough as the mechanical media. What size have we got? Okay just over five inches so that's about 12 and a half centimetres by roughly 10 inches, 26 centimetres. Get some foams cut for this and then we'll chuck some media in. Really that'll be about it, perfect. Right, you're going to get all three pads out of one 17 by 11 inch square pad. Well, not square pad, rectangular pad. So that works out pretty well. Awesome. Actually, I've changed my mind. I'm not going to put Biohome Ultimate in here. I'm going to put Bio Gravel in here. We're going to get maximum surface area in these small trays when we use the Bio Gravel. Most definitely. And because the pump isn't super powerful and the flow is very spread, very controlled, water's easily going to get through here. It's basically a shower filter. Okay so we'll just run through how it works. Pump pumps water up here, lands on all of these foams, goes through the foams, then it goes through the bio gravel, of which we have a lot, comes out the bottom of the trays and it goes back through a special fitting into the tank. That is a really really quick and easy way to modify this particular filter to get it to work really really hard. There's quite a lot of filtration happening in there, certainly enough mechanical filtration and really for a normally stock tank we're way over the top on the biological side as well. You could probably even afford to sacrifice this middle one and put your carbon in if you want carbon as well you know you've got enough scope here. For certainly a normally stocked tank creeping up towards a heavily stocked tank, so it's all good. So there you go, all that stuff's going back along with a fully upgraded overhead shower filter. Shower filters are pretty good so whatever you do, don't rule them out. You know, if you're looking at a new tank and it's got an overhead shower filter in, as long as it's got a decent depth to it, you can get a lot of filtration in there. So hopefully this video has given you the confidence to at least Consider getting a tank with an overhead shower filter. If you found this video useful, please hit the thumbs up button, share it wherever you want. What do you want? And if you would like me to take a look at one of your filters, my contact details are in the video description and also in the pinned comment. I'm not on Facebook, Twitter or forums or any of that sort of thing. I find that those places just seem to be used as echo chambers for people. Just an ego trap really. So if you found this video useful, please by all means share it wherever you want. Thanks very much for watching. I'll see you in the next episode. You got a light, man? Huh? What? Yeah. Hey, I don't think you better light it in here, man. What? Nothing's gas moves, man. Oh, man.