An aquarium filter plays an important role keeping in mind the fishes in your aquarium healthy. It helps to keep your aquarium water free of pollutants which could cause harmful effects to the healthiness of your fishes. Until you change the water everyday, an aquarium filter is important in your aquarium. There are several types aquarium filters obtainable in the market. A few of these fish tank filters are described below.
Canister filter
An aquarium canister filter combines mechanical, biological and chemical filtration. It is just a unit which includes a filter chamber for filter media and an electric pump for circulating water. The water from the aquarium enters the canister filter, is pumped up through the filter media, and flows back again to the aquarium. The filter chamber contains several filter media such as sponges, carbon (charcoal) and ceramic medium.
There are external and internal aquarium canister filters available. An additional aquarium canister filter has inlet and outlet pipes for water to flow from and to the aquarium. Whereas for the interior aquarium canister filter, it’s slits for water to flow into the filter and an outlet from the pump. It’s commonly placed on the floor beneath the aquarium or attached to the trunk of the aquarium glass. Aquarium canister filters have the capacity of filtering several hundred gallons of aquarium water per hour. The benefit of this type of aquarium filter is that its output can be adjusted to any the main tank.
Undergravel filter
An aquarium undergravel filter is just a plastic plate placed between the substrate and the aquarium base with uplift pipes. Water will be drawn down, passing through the substrate lap dat be hai san theo yeu cau, and returned through the uplift pipes. The aquarium undergravel filter is known as as an excellent method for biological filtration. The benefit of this filter is that whilst the inlet is the entire aquarium base area, there is no way that wastes can escape from being processed. There’s a massive amount filter medium readily available for bacterial colonization. The disadvantage of an aquarium undergravel filter is that after the system gets clogged, the cleaning task takes a major upheaval.
Undergravel filters are most suitable to be used in aquariums which do not need big rocks or decorations blocking large parts of the gravel bed. If such big rocks exist, the block plates would create dead spots on the filter. For udergravel filters, it is preferable to use regular gravel substrate as smaller substrates will have a tendency to fall through and larger ones tend to cover huge levels of debris.
Sponge filter
An aquarium sponge filter provides biological filtration. It consists of a perforated plastic tube fitted with a cylindrical sponge. The tube is attached to an air pump. It draws the aquarium water through the sponge, which acts as a medium for trapping bacteria. As a sponge filter does not need the tendency of getting young fishes being sucked up into the filtration unit, it is suited to use within aquariums with small fishes. Sponge filters will also be good to be used in quarantine tanks where fishes are placed for treatment. This is because sponge filters don’t have any chemical filtration which could affect the potency of medications being useful for treatment. As sponge filters only provide biological filtration, they are not suitable to be used in large tanks which may have higher filtration requirements. This sort of fish tank filter is principally used in aquariums with low filtration needs.
Aquarium filters provides filtration which can be essential in all aquariums to be able to keep consitently the clean for the fishes to call home well. The above are some types filters useful for aquarium filtration. These filters provide different level of filtration needs. You can consider using these filters based on the needs of your aquarium.