Best filter for 180 gallon?

[Wesgilroy]

Whats the best filter to use for a 180 gallon aquarium? I plan to plant the tank  micro sword plant and a tall grass plant once i find a suitable one. and going for pea puffers and other schooling fish. What targeted my question is your cannister filters are bad video on youtube. Whats your suggestion?

Edited November 21, 2020 by Wesgilroy

[Roko]

There is no best filter only filter that best suits your needs.

But i am big fun of canister filters and i would recommend Fluval fx 4, but to be honest you could be fine with few sponge filters or two good hang on back filters.

Every one of us will recommend you filter that they like the most. You need to do your research and choose one that you like the most.

[gardenman]

There truly is no one best filter. I tend to use multiple filters with at least one sponge filter in every tank. Multiple filters give you backup should something go wrong. One large, powerful filter that dies at the wrong time can turn your tank into a mess. By using at least one sponge filter, in an emergency (no power) I can use a battery powered air pump to keep things going until the power comes back on. If a filter should die without my realizing it, and it happens, then there's a second filter still chugging away.

I tend to avoid filters that use a proprietary filter pad as the long term costs are absurd. For hang on back filters the Aquaclears are hard to beat. Their sponges can be reused for years. My canister filters are Penn Plax Cascades. I use quilt batting as a mechanical filter medium in them along with sponges.

The big issue with most filters is they don't remove the waste completely from the water, they just hide it. Fish poop, dead plant matter, uneaten food, etc. remains in the water decaying away, it's just out of sight. Theiling with their Rollermat filter tried to solve that problem but their design made it easy for stuff to fall off the fleece and into the bottom of the filter where it would still decay. The newer filter designs by Clarisea with their SK-3000 and possibly Klir with their DI-4 and DI-7 (though I'm not as sure about the latter two as I haven't seen them in person) seem to help eliminate waste completely from an aquarium by physically removing it on a rolling sheet of fleece. This is a similar concept to the revolving drum filters used in expensive koi ponds. Get the bad stuff completely out of the water. I played with a homemade version of the Theiling for my 50 gallon aquarium using quilt batting instead of fleece and the concept was pretty good. I'd just manually advance the batting each time I fed the tank removing the solid waste from the water completely.

My home made version was absurdly simple. (I can post a photo later if you're interested.) Just a plastic box with a roller on each end. Water got pumped into the box from the tank. It then drained through the bottom after passing through the quilt batting. I had a piece of PVC pipe serving as a roller on each end of the box. One end had the unused quilt batting while the other end had the used stuff. Both ends were kept out of the water. I had an overflow cut into the side of the box in case the batting got clogged, water would simply bypass it and go back into the tank. At each feeding (I was using this on my goldfish tank at the time) I would just roll up the somewhat soiled batting out of the water and fresh batting would take its place. The quilt batting just wasn't a perfect filter medium for me. It would be too thin in some places. It would occasionally tear. I looked into other commercial products to use as a filter material, but the purchase quantities were absurdly large. Buying a twenty foot wide roll that's 500' long is kind of excessive. I played around with some paper filters (paper gets too fragile when wet though), Cloth, okay but pricy and would often stay saturated. 

I think a filter like that where you essentially advance a very inexpensive roll of filter material either manually or automatically each time it gets slightly clogged to physically remove debris from the water is ideal in terms of a filter. Instead of just hiding bad stuff in the filter, you're getting rid of it completely. Finding the right filter material at an affordable cost is the big issue I faced. It would be easy to build into most hang on back filters as a prefilter but no one does it.

 

[Daniel]

I know this seems counter-intuitive but you also can run an aquarium without any filter. This aquarium has always operated without a filter. Here is a photo from 2008 when it was a planted tank.

Here it is this year as a hardscape.

 

 

 

[Roko]

All advices you got are good even no filter one as @Daniel told you but keep in mind that type of filter will depend also on stock level of fish and plants. 500 guppy in tank without filter will need daily water changes, is it possible yes is it work intense yes it is. Try and error is best way to learn what filtration and how muck wc you need to have stable ecosystems. Do you care about algae?

With my first aquarium i had 25 gallon and small internal filter plants and lot of algae and everything worked fine until i decided to trim plants and remove algae, and guess what happened ammonia spike... algae was consuming large amount of nutrients so my tank would be stable.

Some let's say anomalies are always possible.

 

[Daniel]

3 minutes ago, Roko said:

With my first aquarium i had 25 gallon and small internal filter plants and lot of algae and everything worked fine until i decided to trim plants and remove algae, and guess what happened ammonia spike... algae was consuming large amount of nutrients so my tank would be stable.

I am having the same experience as @Roko had in his 25 gallon in this 40 gallon. No filter but lots of algae and rangy plants.

Maybe this is a very rough rule of thumb?

• Heavy bioload - canister or something like @gardenman suggests above
• Normal bioload - sponge filter or HOB
• Light bioload - filter is optional

[Roko]

43 minutes ago, Daniel said:

I am having the same experience as @Roko had in his 25 gallon in this 40 gallon. No filter but lots of algae and rangy plants.

Maybe this is a very rough rule of thumb?

• Heavy bioload - canister or something like @gardenman suggests above
• Normal bioload - sponge filter or HOB
• Light bioload - filter is optional

I would agree with this "rule" just wanted to add canister or sump.

[Wesgilroy]

Thanks for the feedback

[FrozenFins]

I would do the fluval fx4 canister filter or you could build a sump with a old aquarium.

[Wesgilroy]

After much research today im leaning towards sump so i can have less equipment in the tank but i need find out how make one