SANDY SITUATION!?

Fresh250 said:

not bad, i did really like how that ended up though... also i have a fine polishing pad in the last chamber or the fluval, this is what you mean by fine poly pad right?

Click to expand...

If your talking about the baskets and the pads they sell for them, no way. I have 2 boxes of the free ones they gave me with the FX5, I cut them into gun cleaning swabs and patches for my black powder .72 caliber "Kodiak Express" double rifle.


This is what I use, notice the cut to fit layer of Polyester quilt batten in front of each sponge filter. Works much better and under normal circumstances will never clog due to the large 300 square inch surface area compared to the basket pad's 35 square inch area.

Looks good, be better if you had more straws and they were cut smaller about 1/4" or smaller. You can also cut old sponge into irregularly shaped .5 to 1/4 inch squares. As long as there is enough spacing to allow good water flow. Also if you going to cover the bottom of one basket with carbon bags you may want to put one layer of small bio balls underneath the carbon bags to keep the nylon bags from sticking and restricting flow.

Your Polyester pads on the sponges look good and will collect allot of dirt without restriction, however if you planing on placing any in the baskets it will really be counter productive as just one basket's flow restricted (and it will with polishing media), will slow the entire filters GPH making the outer sponge pads moot. So if your going to make that mistake do it all the way and don't use the outer polishing pads.

It will definitely work and much faster since GPH will not slow. becasue each basket has its own individual O-ring water that first comes into the canister from the bottom on the outside where the sponges are (outer bottom sponge), water is blocked from getting to the basket tube until it first passes through at least 1 of the 6 sponges (outside to inside) then races to the top of the blocked basket tube passageway to fall inside the top of the first basket.

Once one of the outer sponges starts to get restrictive and slow the flow to the inside passageway, water picks one of the 6 other sponges to flow through until each sponge with its polishing pad is used up. For me it took 4 months and there were still 2 sponges that looked white and hadn't been used up, so for me it will probubly be 6 months before I do another cleaning.

However place a polishing pad inside just one of those baskets which is equivalent to 1 of the 6 outer sponge pads and it will start to restrict after the first week becasue water has no alternative paths, place a polishing pad in each basket (3) and the restriction is multiplied even worse becasue they are in series and not parallel like the outer sponges. So just like in electricity which hydraulics mimics in theory, in an inline series circuit resistance always increases while in a parallel circuit resistance always drops due to the alternate paths of flow be it electrons or water its the same. And even when all the 6 sponges are used up flow is still not restricted becasue each of the 6 sponges although 85% clogged, all 6 sponges collectively still allow 90% full flow. That is the beauty and essence of circumference surface area filtration and the reason for its dominance in industry applications and in every day use in appliances, all except of course for the home aquatic "basket only" canister filter systems ("marketing").

So from a hydraulics theory standpoint which I when to school for twice in my career and applied for 30 years working on hydraulic systems (robotics), I can assure you I am positive of what I am talking about and the application.