Filter replacement advice

[Tetradave]

Hi everyone, I’m new to the forum. I found out about the forum by one of the members here who has just taken over my local aquarium shop. I don’t keep cichlids; it’s not that I don’t want to its just I have never tried to. As the name suggest I keep mainly Tetras and livebearers, there are over 700 known species of tetras from glowlight tetra to the pacu tetra so there is plenty of scope of variety

I bought a 2nd hand Aqua One ( Aqua Style  620T) fish tank. It was missing a lot of parts including the motor but I have replaced everything. I find that the tank doesn’t seem to be clean so I suspect that the filter isn’t cleaning the tank properly, I want to get a canister filter to replace the trickle system.

Edit:

The reason I wanted the canister filter is that the trickle filter doesn't clean the tank, as I said early.

Instead of a canister filter; would a 2nd power head filter be the way to go? The tank is 3 foot and 130 litres.
Could it generate enough current for the detritus to be picked up in the flow and be sucked into the trickle filter?

The downside to this is if the power head was too powerful the fish would be swimming for their very lives.

 

[luis]

By not cleaning the tank do you mean the water itself is not clear or is it just that there are food remains and/or fish waste on the substrate?

[Tetradave]

The water is clean for the most part, its food remains/ fish waste collecting on the substrate, which is gravel.

[Ageofaquariums]

Something like a 2600lph wavemaker would be a good solution here. Place it so it is beside the output of filter. Angle it so it agitates water surface, then water flow hits the far wall, is forced down and then dragged along the substrate and into the trickle filter intake.

 

Basically we are creating circular water movement, just not the usual horizontal water movement people create whirl pools with.

The benefit is that the current along the bottom creates an uplift effect that drags debris up into the water column, rather than letting it settle into the gravel.

This makes it easier to capture waste chunks, rather than just herding into all into a central poop sink.