double filtering
 

SOOoooooOOoooOo...

i picked up an ehiem ecco 2236 canister filter for my 110 gallon feesh tank yesterday. its arranged as so... from bottom to top its a coarse filter pad, many, many layers of their bio media (substrat pro), a fine filter, and a carbon pad.

for the moment up top i have a HOB filter, its a hugemungous tetra bio bag filter. i dumped the carbon out of both filter bags and filled them with substrat pro as well. now, a buddy of mine gave me an older hydor canister filter, rated for 65 gallons, and im going to swap that in for the tetra bio bag filter.

my question is, should for the second filter i set it up with the media just like the ehiem? maybe pure filter media? pure bio media? im just curious if there is a rule of thumb for dual filter setups.

and should i do both intakes on the same side, and both discharges on the other? 1 and 1?

I would switch how you have your canister filter set up. Your bio should be last. Also on your extra filter i would put mechanical first and fill the rest with bio.

so if im getting this, youre saying on my ehiem go coarse, fine, bio, carbon, and set up the other canister the same way?

the way i have it presently is how ehiem says to in the quick start manual, but i trust you guys more than i do whats probably a german translation lol

well just for the benefit of anyone else undergoing the same type of set up...

I did a handful of research all over the net, and talked to a few fish-savvy friends and decided on the following setup. In the Hydor canister filter im going to use a few different layers of various mechanical media, coarse pads, fine pads, ehfi synth and ehfi fix, arranged from coarse to fine, and the remaining space at the top of the media baskets filled with ehfi substrat pro.

the second canister filter (the eheim ecco) will be filled with a coarse and fine pad at the bottom, just to keep things clean, and the remainder of the media basket will be filled with bio balls, ehfi substrat pro, and possibly some ceramic rings.

in this arrangement I would attempt to circulate the water from corner to corner, so the current from the outflow of the mech filter would carry water to the intake of the bio filter, then from there to the mech filter, and so on and so forth.

I will keep everyone posted as to how it comes out!