Fluidised bed filter in fishroom?

[Noddy65]

Hi all

Ive been dreaming about my new fish room and am trying to come up with efficient ways of managing filtering racks of tanks.

The standard way is to run a sump and plumb numerous tanks into the same sump. However cleaning the sumps can be a pain and they also tend to take up a huge amount of space (that I could devote to more tanks).

Heres my idea...how practical would it be to run a rack of tanks, using a small (2 footer?) sump filter as mechanical filtration (basically a prefilter) and then running a fluidised filter between the sump and the return into the tank rack? From what I can gather fluidised bed filters are a more efficient biological filter than sumps and seem to be cheaper to buy and run as well.

Any problems that people can see?

I imagine each rack would hold 1000 - 2000 litres?

Mike

[Josh]

A big sump to run that set-up wouldnt mean you would maybe loose 1 tank. adding a small tank and fluid bed filter would still take as much room.

Go to internal air filters for the tanks if you worried about space

Josh

[Colfish]

Hi all

Ive been dreaming about my new fish room and am trying to come up with efficient ways of managing filtering racks of tanks.

From what I can gather fluidised bed filters are a more efficient biological filter than sumps and seem to be cheaper to buy and run as well.

Any problems that people can see?

I imagine each rack would hold 1000 - 2000 litres?

Mike

hi Mike

Yes, fulidised bed filters are efficient, providing the water is pre filtered. But they also consume huge amounts of oxygen, due to the large number of bacteria present, so i would consider some form of airation supplement between the outlet of the flb and the tank. they don't work to well if run overly fast so you might need to consider some form of extra water circulation

i imagine an lfb to handle 2000 ltr would be a fairly large affair, so maybe space will still be an isssue.

i pre filter my sumps at the weir, yes the sumps still need to be cleaned, though certainly less than before. i syphon them out at each water change and a complete strip down at approx 3 month intervals.

i run a 2x18x16 sump on ea rack approx. 1000 lts