An Ounce of Prevention

nfored

Hello All.
As promised I have been slowly getting ready for a 200 Gallon long tank. I don’t have anything yet but the filter a "Eheim pro 3", my question is what happens if this thing dies. What kind of back up would I need to have in place? With my 55G tank this is no problem I am using a HOB filter and if it died not so much of a problem to rush and buy another for less than 50 bucks. I can't say the same with a 300 dollar filter. I had thought about a sponge filter always in the tank in case of an outage, but the biggest one I can find only says it’s good for 125 gallons. I really don't want 2 or 3 of these in my tank as this would take up precious space.

What are your suggestions?

I currently have a 55G with 6 bala sharks and 2 rainbow sharks, so I promised my fish when I bought them last week I would get them a new home before they got past 6 inches. I figure if I start buying the small stuff now it won’t be so hard to drop for the tank in about a year.

fish_4_all

Have a backup HOB filter on hand. If the canister fails, fill the HOB with as much of the biological media as possible from the canister and things should stay fairly level as far as keeping the tank going. Another option, herefishy will love this, is to set up a reverse flow UGF. If you were to set it up so that you have 2, 3 or 4 power heads running it then the canister will only be a mechanical filter for the most part. If the canister fails, no total loss and even if 50% of the power heads fail you still have a chance to get new ones before the tank would catastrophically crash.

The combination of the reverse flow UGF and the canister would also make it much easier to clean this tank in the long and short run. Just make sure to filter the powerheads that are in reverse flow and this would also double, triple or quadruple the mechanical filtration and also serve as a back up mechanical filter if the canister ever fails.

As for sponge filters, even if you only had one large one, or a number of small ones stacked up on top of each other it would serve to keep the tank from crashing long enough for you to get a replacement filter. I would imagine it could keep the tank balanced for 3-10 days if you kept up with water changes and didn't feed much in the case of a canister failure.

Online Sponge Filters