Do You Really Need To Replace Filter Media?

[jarthel]

I'm talking about media like noodles, bioballs and sintered glass. Do you really need to replace these? They are not like carbon and other "absorbing" material (various media from seachem and etc) that get spent.

I can see the logic in cleaning them as part of a routine maintaing the canister. but replacing them? the only reason I can think of is if there is too much "goo" in the media hampering the flow. I would then use clean media and I can clean the old ones to be reused?

Can you please enlightened me?

Thank you very much

 

[rebrn]

From my understanding, media such as you mentioned does not need to be replaced, just cleaned. Unless of course it is falling apart, then you might what to replace it, but other than that believe you just clean it.

 

[fatheadminnow]

The bio-media you mentioned should not break down at all. All you need to do is clean the media in tank water about once a month. Other than that, no, you should not replace that bio-media unless it is falling apart.

-FHM

 

[OldMan47]

Nice solid ceramic media of various shapes never needs to be replaced as biomedia. Some of the noodles made by Eheim are intended to be used as mechanical media. Those would probably keeep working fine as bio-media but would need some kind of cleaning if they were filtering out solids from the water. I am not sure how to go about that to refresh the media and make it work like new.

 

[BlackWidow]

Scrub it FTW!

 

[waterdrop]

Many experienced aquarists here on TFF pride themselves on getting a lifetime of use (or at least they -plan- on getting a lifetime of use out of their solid media options. Ceramic rings/noodles and ceramic gravels probably have the edge over other media types for lasting a lifetime and still having very high surface area liked by bacteria. As OM says though, the porous types, the ones that look kind of volcanic rock-like in nature, might not get cleaned out quite as well by rinsing. Bioballs have the problem of being less dense in terms of packing, they are really a better choice in very large undertank sump filters. I would think that plastic pot scrubbers would have a significantly higher surface area than bioballs for a given volume and they are extremely tough and would probably last a lifetime or a little less. Sponge comes in significanly different materials. The toughest types of sponge probably approach lasting a lifetime and of course are right up there with ceramics as one of the very top choices of biomedia. Sponges with less tough material are just as good for as long as they last but will at some point begin to break up and will need replacement.

When the day comes for biomedia to be replaced, its always important to divide up the replacement into at least two or three chunks at a time. For instance, cut the old sponge into thirds and replace one third with a piece of new sponge, wait two weeks and replace another third and so on. For loose media its even easier to accomplish the same thing.

~~waterdrop~~