Too Much?

[frodo11]

I have a 36 gallon bow front freshwater tank, well planted, 2 decent sized pieces of driftwood, fine textured substrate (texture somewhere between gravel & sand).

The tank’s occupants are 5 corys and (I’d like to tell you how many but what time is it?) guppies – started with 3 male & 6 female … well, have many, many, many right about now … anyway,

Initial filtration provided by a Fluval C4 (rated for up to 70 gal) … filter/tank has been cycled for +/- 2 months … a minor issue has been the sponge “pre-filter” I have on the intake tube … it keeps the guppy fry from being sucked into the filter but does tend to get clogged and severely restrict flow to and from the filter (required once or twice weekly “squeeze-out” in water change bucket, have changed to a cut up hunk of filter sponge doesn’t seem to clog as fast).

The real problem and the impetus for this posting is that on a couple of occasions, during water changes, when I have unplugged the filter it has not turned back on when plugged back in … unplugging, re-plugging repeatedly has sometimes worked but finally resulted in an “emergency” trip to Petsmart for a new C4 … installed it, swapped the media with the “broken” one and away we went … of course an hour later the “broken” one worked just fine …

In response, and to forestall early morning or late evening trips to Petsmart, I have just installed a Hydro-Sponge Pro III sponge filter in addition to the C4 …

Question: Too much? Any comments?
Thanks

 

[wroberson]

You can't have too much filtration, but you can have too much water flow. The longer amount of time the water interacts with the filter media, the cleaner the return water outflow will be. A 70 gallon filter in a 36 gallon aquarium was the better choice for so many reasons. Overtime all mechanical parts tend to reduce efficiency and having twice as much filtration over the minimum require will allow for a 30-50% reduction of performance before a replacement is needed. Having a back up was also a good idea since you will not have to dart out in the middle of the night to give the tank filtration.