What are advantages of canister filters?

birdlover6

I'm running a Marineland Emperor 400 on my 60 gallon tank. It came highly recommended and I've read good reviews about it on the web.

Anyway, my question is why would I want a canister filter? Are there advantages to having a canister filter on a 60 gallon aquarium. I know I never see them on small aquariums - just very large ones.

Thanks!

Spooki

They hold a lot of media and there are a lot of options for what you can put in them vs the single cartridge filters. One of the things I really like about them is you can hide them, all you see in the tank are the intake and output tubes. Many canisters will have different options for the output allowing you to pump the water back in at the bottom of the tank or getting the waterfall effect of a HOB. Canisters will give you better flow and circulation than HOBs for large tanks- you get the advantage of being able to put the input on one end and the output on the other. With HOBs input and output are practically on top of each other.

SinCrisis

I think the main reason is the more advanced filtration since you have more filter media options and most canisters let you customize what you put into it. They also allow for larger surfaces for bio filtration, foam used in canisters are much larger than HOBs. There are smaller canister filters available for smaller tanks, its just far more convenient to use HOBs or internals for small tanks so demand has not been as high for canisters in small tanks.

Also canisters afford you more placement options for your filter< ie tanks that need to be against a wall will probably be better with canisters so the filter is underneath rather than HOBs which will cause a large gap between the wall and the tank.

redchigh

All those are good, but canisters are also great for planted tanks... They preserve CO2 levels.

Grimmjow

Do you like your emperor 400? Ive had mine on for a couple days and im going to be switching to a canister because of how much noise this thing make, plus i think the spray bars inside are stupid and i hear they get clogged a lot.