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I'm still cycling my new 55 gallon tank. It has an AquaClear 300 on it right now which I am sure will be sufficient for filtration because I always stock lightly and plan to have it moderately planted.

I'm noticing though that there is alot of debris settling on the far ends of the tank. I tried to put the filter and heater as close to the center of the tank as possible, but I worry that the circulation won't be enough. I don't want to add any more surface agitation unless I need to. I was thinking about trying the DIY co2 diffuser that uses a submersible powerhead with a prefilter on it and a gravel vac tube. Would this sufficiently increase circulation or do I need something else as well? How do you get the water to circulate well in these long tanks?

Thanks

[span class="edited"][Edited by MO 2004-07-17 21:09][/span]

Powerheads work well, and if you set up the co2 diffuser with powerhead like you mentioned, should solve your problems.

I use canister filters on tanks that size, personally. The intake on end and the outflow on the other. On my 75 gallon tank I use two canisters, with the intakes on the end, about an inch from the substrate and the outflows ( both spraybars) in the dead center just below the water line. I use an inline reactor for co2, which is also not hard to diy.

It's hard to get sufficient currents in a tank using HOB filters. . the outflow and intake are not particularly adjustable to direct flow and the intakes are directly below the outflows.. so you are getting mostly only vertical currents. All you can really do with HOB's is add more HOB's ( which still leaves dead spaces), or powerheads, pumps ( internal or external), and so on.

I think I'll try a powerhead. Circulation was not something I was thinking of when I bought the filter...I was mostly concerned about getting adequate filtration. If I have problems with it I can always upgrade to a canister filter without loosing much money. The Aquaclear was pretty cheap and so far I have been very impressed with it compared to my other HOB power filters that require special cartridges that I hate using.

Thanks

Circulation was not something I was thinking of when I bought the filter...I was mostly concerned about getting adequate filtration

I know what you mean, but circulation and filtration is directly linked. You can't stand by your tank fanning debris and gunk towards the filter . After awhile, if you have a heavy bioload and messy fish, or a planted/heavily planted tank, you'd begin to notice areas of the tank collecting gunk...every time you went to gravel vac there'd be certain areas that you would suck up a lot of surface gunk from ..."dead spots" where detrius would drop off at when the water movement dropped off.

In my opinion, the usefulness of HOB filters would increase tenfold if the inflow and outflow could be telecoped out to wherever you wanted....like the intake and outflow could be ran like a normal HOB or pulled off and a flexible water hose would allow them to be pulled out to seperate ends of the tank or something...like a HOB with canister-type intake and outflow. It would make more sense for water circulation purposes and still make the HOB people happy. Nevermind me... I'm just daydreaming, lol.