BIORB COMPATIBLE UPGRADE KIT

Hello there welcome to another DIY filtration video. Many of you will know me from my channel if you're subscribed. If you haven't subscribed you may know me as the fella that invented the internal moving bed filters for aquariums, the invisible filters for aquariums. But in this video I'm gonna take on my biggest challenge ever. I've been in the aquatics trade for about 20 years or so. In that time I've installed ponds, aquariums, made hundreds of filters, I've done pretty much everything I would like to have done in that trade, except one thing, and that is to make this particular aquarium work properly. I'll give you a few clues as to this aquarium's identity. I've seen it referred to as the ball of death, the sphere of death, the tank of death, many other things, followed by of death. I'm sure you've guessed. The humble bio-orb. Oh my god! Ponguru's committing suicide. He's gonna try and do something with a bio-orb. But for as long as these things have been in production, I've been desperate for one to come out with good filtration, good media, and something filter-wise that's really been thought about. I'm still waiting. So I've decided to take matters into my own hands. It's pointless me waiting for somebody else to do it. I'm gonna do it myself. This is going to work, but before it does, I really need to show you how this thing works, or how it is meant to work, so that you understand what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. So here we go. Let's just see how this thing works. So the basic components of this are an acrylic sphere, a plastic base, a plastic top, which can be swapped. You can have various colours on here. A light sits on there. That goes away with a transformer. On off switch on there pretty standard thing and in that light top you've got a little hole you've got a little hole to drop food through This one i've got is one of the older ones. It's got a halogen light in which don't last forever It's only 10 watts doesn't give you much light output and it's on or off Later versions have LEDs which can come on and off in cycles so they can come on and do like a dawn, midday, nighttime Ideally, we need a filter and this does come with an integrated filter Now this is an air driven filter, so you've got an air pump that attaches onto an air line, the air line runs to the bottom of the tank, you've got a non-return valve on here and it goes into the bottom. Looking inside the tank we've got a little air stone here, the air comes up here and it bubbles up a tube. Obviously air bubbling up a tube isn't going to filter the water. So here we've got a little replaceable filter and inside of there we've got medium grade foam cut into a little O-shape. Strange concoction of what looks like carbon, possibly zeolite. Crushed shells of all things. Strange one. Now the manufacturers recommend that you change this every four to six weeks. It's because it's got carbon in. Carbon takes in pollutants. And if you don't change it regularly, it releases those pollutants back into the water. So you get ammonia spikes, nitrite spikes. None of which are good for the fish. Now I mentioned the tube before. Here it is. Got a flange on the bottom there. What we do, lock that into position, and then we drop that in here. Twist it the other way. Now we've got an air-driven filter in here. So the air that's driven into the bottom of the tank goes through this hole and up the tube. Obviously, air rises in water. It's all good. That creates draw. So water's drawn down from the top of the tank into the bottom, comes up here with the air. But it doesn't all go up here. Some of it circulates around that foam. Now the underneath of that flange has got little raised bits, and what that does, put that on, it presses down on the foam and keeps it below the level of this. So a little bit of that water that's been sucked in travels up here and hits the foam, goes through the foam, through our carbon, possibly zeolite stuff in there, of which there's hardly any. And then it goes back up here. So it's like a little cyclical motion going in here, very slow flow. That keeps the water reasonably clean because it's a mechanical filter and it should keep it healthy, but there's not really enough stuff in there to keep it healthy and there's nothing to support bacteria. So if there's nothing in there to support bacteria, we need some filter media. And that stuff is called alpha grog. It's the smaller sort of alpha grog, which is the 25 mil. Now this is a ceramic filter media. In that it's made of clay, it's fired, and that creates loads of little holes in it and so on. It's got a porosity of approximately 24-26%, which means that it will support bacteria. This is actually a good media, but this is a terrible place to have it. Actually, I forgot to mention the filter has got little holes in around the bottom to allow the water to come in from the bottom of the tank. That's quite important. So that goes in the bottom of the tank. Makes it look better than it did, which is all I can say about it. Water being water, it always takes the path of least resistance, because this is a big, chunky media, the water just travels around it, through into the bottom, through the little bit of foam, and out the top. So really, that's pretty much doing nothing in there. It means that that little bit of foam, and the few bits of carbon, is all that's keeping this water healthy. or not healthy, as the case is in thousands of these. Because that little bit of foam filter in the cartridge, Needs replaced and every four to six weeks that works out quite expensive if you were very diligent and replaced it every four weeks and if you bought it from pets at home like I did that'll be £7.75 each time. Take that over 12 months it's £93 just for replacement filters which don't do the job very well. I'm going to show you now how I've solved all those problems that I've mentioned. You'll be impressed with this because it shows a brand new sort of filter media Which has... Applications far beyond the Bio-Orb. I'm exceptionally excited about this one. How to make this thing work properly. I've emptied the alpha grog out the bottom, so we're down just to the bare tank. The proper filter cartridge, brand new. I'll leave that in, and I'll come to that last. Because you've got a choice of either keeping that or altering it. And you've got a lot of choices of how to set this up. I'm gonna show you one way, but you can tweak it to your own requirements. Reflection on there, Yeah, it looks like I'm holding a giant light bulb. The filter sticks up from the bottom about two inches, so you'd think, oh, I'll just chuck a load of gravel in there. I'll sort it. I'm going to do something different. Now, I am going to make an undergravel filter out of this, and this is where I start. Here's a lump of foam that I've been using just to experiment on. This is exactly the same as the stuff that comes in the pack, just a different colour. It's a coarse foam, and it's got an egg box sort of shape to it. There you go. In other words, it's got a bumpy top to it. That's quite important because that increases the surface area. When your water is contacting that, you want it to be in contact with as much foam as possible. First thing I've done, that foam and that goes bumpy side down around our filter at the bottom. Now you can just about see that there's holes all the way around the bottom. That's for the water to get through when the foams are really clogged. So that's our first foam. Now that means that none of your little fish are going to get sucked into the filter. Which I think they wouldn't do anyway, but apparently somebodies did. I've been reading reviews of these on Amazon, just to see what people thought of them. One of them is the Bio-Orb ate my fish. He must have been using a nuclear powered air pump to create that much suction. But there you go, if that is a real problem, this solves it. On top of that first ring of foam, we're going to put another ring of foam. This one again goes over the central filter, but this time it's bumpy side up. That's to hold the media that we're now gonna put on top. And that foam comes to just above the level of this base. Just see it poking up there. And it's set back a little bit off the side of the tank. And that's important because our media is gonna go on top of there and also just over the sides as well. So when you look in, you can't see any foam. This is where I get excited. This is a specially made media for under gravel filters. It can be used as a shrimp substrate, a planting substrate, it can be used in all of your little DIY internal filters, it can be used in ordinary internal filters, it's got a lot of uses, this stuff. It can also be used in the hang on the back filters because of its small size. And what this is, is a gravel that's made from the same material as bio-home. Anybody that's used or researched BioHome will know that, hands down, it's the best filter media out there. Nothing comes close. This stuff is the one type of media that's been missing from the range of BioHome, and now it's here. I'll pour this in, and then I'll show you what it looks like with this in, and talk through exactly what's going to happen with this tank. At the bottom of here now, we've got enough filter media to filter. The overstock tank, many, many times the size of this, easily, and that's ammonia, nitrite and nitrate, remember the bio home sorts out your nitrate as well, as long as you use roughly a kilo per 100 litres, and we've used a lot more than that here, your nitrates should come down to next to zero, there you go, looks just like gravel, I'll give you a close up view of it in a minute because it's not too clear through this dirty tank. But there we've got an under gravel filter. You can get proper BioWarp gravel cleaners, which will clean that perfectly. This stuff actually works a lot better than gravel, not only because it actually filters the water, because of its porous structure, but it's slightly lighter than gravel. It's still very dense, but it's lighter than gravel. And when you use a gravel cleaner with ordinary gravel, quite often you're pushing it in, and unless you've got a hell of a suction going, which drains your tank in no time, the gravel just sits in the bottom. It doesn't move very well. This is a little bit lighter, so it actually moves a lot better. It means it cleans better. So that solves another problem of how to clean the gravel properly. So how does it work? Well we've got air coming in the bottom, it goes in and the bubbles come up the central pipe. As they're going up, water's drawn in through this bio gravel, goes through the foams and then it goes through those little holes in the bottom of the filter, up the pipe, some of it doesn't go up the pipe, some of it circulates through the other bit of foam, through the And then eventually it all ends up going back out the pipe, up at the top, and starting the cycle again. It's pretty simple. Now as this stuff supports aerobic bacteria, just like every other filter media does, the aerobic bacteria get to work on the ammonia, they love that, they process that into nitrite, and then they process the nitrite into nitrate. And in most filter setups, that's where the cycle ends. Nitrates build up in your tank. You need to do water changes regularly to reduce the nitrates. If you don't, it stunts the growth of the fish and they don't like it. Because this media supports anaerobic bacteria as well, which live inside the porous media, they convert nitrate. So your nitrates actually reduce. It does take a lot longer than the ammonia and nitrite to come down. Safe to say, four to six months, your nitrates in here will be rock bottom. You probably won't be able to trace them. So for ammonia and nitrite, you should complete your cycle two to three weeks. For the full cycle, which doesn't happen in 99.9% of people's tanks, the nitrate reduction, four to six months. So within six months, you should have... Water quality that is out of this world. There you go. That's basically a small gravel made out of sand. Gravel tends to raise the pH in your tank, which is no good for about 90% of the fish you buy from fish stores. Pretty good for live bearers, mollies, guppies, platies, swordtails, that sort of thing. Everything else that I can think of, apart from Malawi, which you wouldn't have in there, I like pH a little bit lower. Having something that doesn't raise the pH allows you to bring the pH down in there quite easily. There you go, we'll just have a look in the top of there. It looks just like gravel, can't see any of the foam and all you're going to see is air coming up here, just like you would in a normal BioOrb. That's pretty much the filter sorted, you really don't need anything more than that. The water quality in here after a while is going to be perfect, providing you haven't got fish swimming over each other's backs. If you keep a sensible stocking they're going to be very, very happy. But what about if we want to do something with that little filter, that little replaceable one in the middle? Let's move our media out of the way, lift that out, and you can stick with changing this every four to six weeks if you want. With this setup, you don't have to. There's no point whatsoever. You've got the foam filtration, you've got the extra mechanical filtration afforded by this media, you've got the biological filtration, which means you're not going to have ammonia, nitrite or nitrate. Your carbon is gonna be obsolete because you don't need it to draw in the ammonia and nitrite. There won't be any bacteria. We'll make sure there is none. So what can we do with this? Well, we haven't got any fine filtration in here, so we can take this out. We could just put a little bit more of this stuff in here, put the foam back on, or we could put some fine pad in here. There's your fine pad. You can buy these for four or five quid, 11 inches by 17 inches. Roughly between 40 mil and 50 mil thick, which is inch and a half to two inches. All you do, cut that to size, whack it in there, put your top back on, and you've got a fine filter pad which is going to filter out microscopic little things. So as your water is slowly flowing over this fine particle matting, it's going to get microscopically clean. Your water will be gin clear. Jobs are good and beautiful. Because that media is slightly rough, you can put plants straight into there to get a good hold with the roots on the media. Shrimps love this stuff because it's porous. They love to pick on with it, and because it's reasonably light compared to gravel, they can move it a lot easier as well. So if they wanna get to something underneath there, they just move it out the way. Same goes for loaches, Corydoras, that sort of thing. Ordinarily, I would say do not ever use gravel with them, not just because it raises the pH, but because they have a problem moving it quite often when it's big gravel. This stuff, they can move no problem at all. Just marvellous stuff. To show you inside this media, I've actually got a little microscope that attaches to my PC, and I took a microscopic view of a piece of this media that I'd cracked in half. Have a look at this. It's porous. Gravel is not like that. This stuff is porous all the way through. The water goes through it extremely slowly, which allows your anaerobic bacteria to live there. the media in here should last a good six to ten years at high efficiency. It'll still act just as gravel after that. It'll become ridiculously clogged and blocked after that time with successive generations of bacteria, but it'll still work well. It'll still function as an undergravel filter in here. So I'm not stupid enough to say you put it in, you never replace it. You put it in, it's going to be a hell of a long time before you need to replace it. People that watch my videos know that I'm always on about keeping the media as clean as possible, setting the filters up perfectly. Coarse, medium, fine foam so all your muck gets taken out and then your media's sitting in clean water. It's not going to happen in this case, but there is a way to clean this media very, very easily. All we need to do to clean it, Just to put some in a jug, take some tank water out, because it's mature, good water. Put it in, just over the media. Swirl the media around, and because it's slightly rough, each piece of media will scour the one next to it. That's gonna clean off all the crap that's on the media. Your water's gonna turn a horrible color. Drain the water off, give it a quick rinse, put it back in. Media is as good as new. So now you can go out into your garages, into your lofts, Get all those BioOrb that you've chucked out because your fish died, upgrade them, put some fish in. Just bear in mind that these things aren't suitable for the likes of angelfish, which get tall, or goldfish, which get big. Really, with it being spherical, you've only got a small swimming space. The rest of it's very narrow, so stick to small species. In here, with this filter system, you should easily be able to get 10, 12 little fish, plus a few shrimps. Ordinarily, you wouldn't be able to keep shrimps in here because your levels of pollution would fluctuate hellish. There's not going to be any pollution in here. It's going to be processed before the fish even realise it's there. This is now a fully functional fishtank. I'm probably just going to call this BioOrb Compatible Upgrade Kit, or something like that. I don't want to market it as a BioOrb product because it isn't. It's not from Reef One. This is something that I've come up with myself. It's an upgrade kit to make this thing work properly. I'm sure in their hearts they would want the fish tank to work properly. This allows it to happen. But it's going to be BioOrb compatible. Because there are numerous tanks like this from other manufacturers that have basically copied this design and also the faults with the filtration. So it's not just suitable for BioOrbs, it's suitable for the copies as well. A massive thanks to Michael who makes BioHome for me. We had a discussion a few months ago and we were saying how good it would be if we could get something that could actually be used as a substrate and also a filter media. It solves so many problems and unlike gravel it doesn't raise the pH. So you can have it in high pH tanks or low pH tanks. Check out my eBay shop, it's in the link video description. If you've liked the video click like. No doubt there'll be people with other aquatic channels who've come up with something exactly the same. Pass it off as their own idea but just remember where you saw it. Not too bad. I'm just in the middle of shooting a video of this awesome filter media that I've got. So I'm happy about that. It's been years in the making. I haven't actually told anybody about the marine one yet on YouTube. The marine one's undergoing testing, aye. And it's blowing everything else out of the water. This is another one, this is a new one. It's almost like, well it is a gravel, but it's a gravel that's made from the same material as the other stuff. So it's ridiculously porous. Which allows it to not only be used on the bottom of the tank, but also as in little filters as well. It acts as a filter media. It's absolutely hellish, there's just nothing like it, you know. I'm so excited because there's these things called bio-orbs. You might have seen them in shops like Pets at Home and all that. They're like a, they're just a sphere, and the bubbles come up the middle of it. The filtration in them is not the best, you know. They're known as like the ball of death and all that. I mean, I would never stock them. But I've come up with an idea to make them, and it would be an under-gravel filter.