Maxing out my filtration capabilities, which should I do?

[captmicha]

Maybe I'm making things more hard on myself and should just go with a canister, but a show (doesn't look like it, I know! Lol) tank in the sunroom is currently pretty stocked up with three adult Rainbow Cichlids... And a mosquito fish... I won't have that much room for a hidden canister filter in the cabinets.

I can't keep up with frequent water changes so it can get funky and I'm trying to prevent that.

Eventually, I want a pretty big tank in my fish room to house these guys but right now, this 65 tall is my biggest tank so they get it for now.

To give myself more flexibility on water changes, I want to max out my filtration capabilities.

There's a larger cabinet with weird dimensions below it and a smaller cabinet (anchored to struts) above it.

If I did a filter above the tank in that smaller top cabinet, I'm not going to have all that much room for bacteria and I'm not confident of how much water weight it can support.

In the cabinet below, there's a lot more room but it's weird dimensions.

I was thinking I'd do a trickle filter into a sump.

Dimensions:
-Cabinet goes back 22" deep
-Height of bottom shelf is only 10"
-17" is the width across the front of the cabinet door
-It's 20" in height in the entire cabinet
-And this tall area can only be 7" deep until I hit that recessed shelf

So I've got two areas of dimensions to work with here: (LxWxH):
-Trickle filter area:
17"x7"x20"
-Sump area:
17"x22"X10"

I was just going to use 60 ppsi foam in the whole thing. (I can't find it anymore but there was water treatment plant research about best biological filtration)

So these are weird areas and I don't think I can necessarily easily find containers these dimensions, which probably means that I'll have to diy.

So that brings me to the questions of... Is it cheaper and easier to do glass or acrylic?

Where do I source these materials cheaply?

Apparently glass cutting places have scrap glass sometimes. But some of these pieces don't seem all that small.

I have some broken aquariums but not enough for this.

Home Depot isn't all that cheap. I'm on a small budget.

Window glass is easy to find but too thick and can't be cut, pretty sure that stuff is tempered. Unless I'm wrong?

Acrylic isn't cheap either. It doesn't have to be clear.

I called around some sign shops several months ago and big sheets of currogated acrylic isn't exactly cheap.

I'm not supposed to set up a big filter outside of the tank and out of the cabinets.

Right now I'm over filtering it with two HOB filters over rated for this tank with 60 ppsi foam but it's not enough.

Maybe I'm missing a simple and obvious solution here. I make a lot of stupid mistakes!

 

[mchambers]

60 ppi foam is going to clog quickly. Stephan Tanner's presentation at a CCA meeting almost two years ago included a slide showing that the biological filtration capacity was still good with bigger porosity foam. You can see the same information here:

http://www.swisstropicals.com/library/swisstropicals-poret-foam/

Finally, if you're using a sump, you'll have plenty of biological filtration capacity.

 

[captmicha]

Well, I meant to add pics but forgot!

 

[captmicha]

60 ppi foam is going to clog quickly. Stephan Tanner's presentation at a CCA meeting almost two years ago included a slide showing that the biological filtration capacity was still good with bigger porosity foam. You can see the same information here:

http://www.swisstropicals.com/library/swisstropicals-poret-foam/

Finally, if you're using a sump, you'll have plenty of biological filtration capacity.

See? Stupid mistakes. I meant I have 30 PPI. I have to get more so I might move up a little bit in PPI, but not as high as 60. Thanks

 

[DiscusnAfricans]

You could remove the shelf from the lower cabinet, would give you more room in general for a bigger, or at least standard size sump. You'd have to relocate some of the stuff/equipment, but seems like that shouldn't be too hard.

 

[FishEggs]

Am I reading something wrong? You have 4 fish in a 65 gallon tank and 2 hob filters are not enough? Are you adding more fish?

 

[Hicgup]

Could learn a bit from the world of aquaculture, go with a moving bed filter using Kaldnes media. A one cubic foot moving bed could handle about 150 POUNDS of fish fed a 43% protein diet at 3% body weight per day. Twenty adults would'nt max out a moving bed.

 

[Airborne001]

I have to agree with Fisheggs. If those are 2 Emperor HOB's in good functioning order and with spinning biowheels, you are already over-filtered.

One upgrade I can suggest is to remove the Marineland cartridges and fill each filter with foam cut from Aqua-clear 70 filter foam. You can also put extensions on the intakes and extend them almost to the bottom. This turns over water better, the foam will will catch a lot more mulm, it acts as a biological medium, and will last forever.