What Went Wrong With My Eheim?

[Barday]

Hi all,

Not a good start to the day for me!

I was asleep in my room when all of a sudden my eheim 2222 woke me up at 4:45am making a really weird noise.

I got up and gave it a little shake, and it was still really noisy. I looked in the tank and it was absolutely full of crap. I mean it's almost like the filter backfired and started pumping out dirty water.

So as a result at 5:00 am this morning, instead of being in a nice warm comfey bed, I was cleanin out friggin fish crap, freezin in my boxers!!

Has anyone else ever had this problem with an eheim?

It's a pretty new filter, I bought it about 3 months ago and I hav never cleaned it......but i've heard of people leaving it for 4-6 months and it being fine? U think i got a faulty unit or something?

Thanks
Barday

 

[Bloo]

Oh dear Was it clogged with plant matter of something else perhaps ? It's not happened to me, but perhaps you should check your filter at least every couple of months.

 

[Matty]

probably clogged with matter. rinse out the media in old aquarium water and restart it. should be fine.

 

[Barday]

I did clean it out, but not with tank water. I used normal tap water with a few squirts of dechlorinator in it. The last thing I wanted to do at 5 am was a water change on top of the filter clean!

It's all working fine now...just got home and the tank is crystal clear, but it just annoyed me that it was so easy for my tank to fill up with dirt from the filter. What if the tank was not in my room and the filter didn't wake me up? I would have come home to a few dead fish I suspect

 

[Bloo]

It definitely sounds like to was clogged up. You need to rinse the media baskets in some siphoned tank water and give things a good clean. Not all tanks and filters can be maintained in the same manner - it depends greatly on the stock load and setup (such as heavily planted etc).

You might want to think of checking your filter more often to ensure it doesn't happen again

 

[Cichlidkeeper]

Well, now you have a good reason not to ignore your filter All kidding aside, If you aren't changing your media atleast once a month you are being lazy. I'm not saying I havn't done it before. A filter dosn't clean your water, it collects waste. If you aren't removing the waste from the filter you aren't cleaning the water. All that waste is breaking down in your filter raising your nitrates.

I could only assume that is the problem. It was probably so clogged water worked its way around the media flushing all the crap into the tank. Good luck I hope the problem is that simple.

 

[fishing4exotics]

Check the water flow on your canister outlet from time to time. If see a noticeable drop on output flow take your filter apart and clean out the media with tank water.