Airborne 82nd Posted June 7 Share Posted June 7 I use my Tidal 75 different now. It didn't take long to see how fast it clogs up. I have a 75 gal. tank with one Oscar and one Pleco no live plants. No matter what filter you have what ever the manufacturers GPH rates it as cut that number in half. They rate them with no media and no head. I just use mine to polish the water I have a 20 ppi sponge on the bottom with 2 to 3 inches of floss on top of that. Now as soon as I see flow slowing down I unplug it grab the floss out put in new and turn it on. Every month I break it down to clean and lube the pump. My mods are 1 removed the blue valve in the water and drilled out that hole to open it up. Blocked off all of the skimmer and holes on the pump cover. 3 Put on a intake prefilter. Now this is Not going to keep a Oscar tank clean. So my main filter is a fluval 407 on it I use the stock two large pre filters and on my bottom tray is the stock black sponge. The other three trays have 50 pot scrubbers. No fine floss in this filter. I ran it like this for one month then took a peek. The pre filters were not that bad but I cleaned them and the bottom tray filter but did not mess with the other three trays. cleaned and lubed the pump. Now I will go 6 weeks and take a peek. I want to lube the pump by that time anyway. No one has the same tank with the same bio load so why should the filters all be set up the same? Airborne Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnnyxxl Posted June 7 Share Posted June 7 On 6/7/2024 at 5:36 AM, Airborne 82nd said: No one has the same tank with the same bio load so why should the filters all be set up the same? Airborne I totally agree, I run 2 medium size co-op sponge filters, but my tank looks like a jungle. I have a small internal filter for polishing my water if I see to much detritus in it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
svachon9 Posted June 7 Author Share Posted June 7 Crazy question- What if I took out the basket all together and put sponges to fit? Would that take care of the bypass problem? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pepere Posted June 7 Share Posted June 7 (edited) Yes. Coarse sponge friction fit in place of the basket and leaving about a half inch gap under the bottom of the sponge would likely give your best performance. This would eliminate the bypass if you could get it into a spacethat closely fits all the sides. fitting a coarse sponge prefilter on the pickup tube would help tremendously at avoiding premature clogging. one of the isdues with the tidal is the bottom to top flow which gives a rather small cross section of area that can clog quickly. An intake prefilter sponge would dramatically improve that situation. Edited June 7 by Pepere 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmark285 Posted June 7 Share Posted June 7 On 6/7/2024 at 8:15 AM, svachon9 said: What if I took out the basket all together and put sponges to fit? I initially thought the Aqua Clear's fold down basket was kludgy but now i understand the logic. The foam block is a tight fit against the front/back wall which limits the water bypass issues. The removable basket on the Tidal is great for marketing but is a bad engineered product. I agree with Pepere advice. Water bypassing the filter media is an issue on many filter, I had this problem using large foam blocks in my first sump design. After a week or so, the water would just overflow the foam filter. I solve this problem with filter sock, no more foam blocks for me. Canisters filter limits this problem by forcing the water thru the media using the water pump. On a well designed canister filter, there is no alternate path for the water. An issue with canister filter being cleaned once a month, do you want all that organic material being broken down inside the filter or is it better to just remove it before it breaks down? With my sump filter, I replace the filter socks once a week which is quite easy to do and only takes a couple minutes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nabokovfan87 Posted June 7 Share Posted June 7 On 6/6/2024 at 3:50 PM, svachon9 said: My bottom line is, as long as the filter is supporting bacteria, and providing sone mechanical filtration (which it appears to be doing both) then who cares it there is some overflow. Am I wrong? On some level... It's basically just moving water. The mechanical filtration is doing 15% of the work it should be and the majority of the flow is just hitting the media bag and tossing dirt into it. This means your media gets dirty and you literally aren't doing much beyond moving water. You have very simple adjustments that can improve things. Using fine foam to block the path from one cutout and use the bottom sponge is one of the easiest. I would encourage you to go check out the tidal thread, see the pictures and videos showing the issues. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Airborne 82nd Posted June 7 Share Posted June 7 Ok I'm trying to understand the idea of removing the basket. Now I can build a 1/2 inch plastic stand off and cut foam to fit tight. I can't picture how the water is going to get under the foam. I thought the water runs down that large notch area on the front of the basket? Or is that notch a bypass channel? I can not get the water flow direction in my mind. Can someone explain this? I would love to try it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pepere Posted June 8 Share Posted June 8 (edited) On 6/7/2024 at 7:11 PM, Airborne 82nd said: Ok I'm trying to understand the idea of removing the basket. It has been well over a year since I looked at this ridiculous design…. I went in the cellar and pulled it out…. It is worse than I remember…. I would suggest it would be better to get a bew filter rather than working on this one. you can not simply remove the basket and stuff it with foam because the water enters the media at the top. You would still have hopeless bypass by just stuffing it with foam. The removable basket gives a baffle to direct water to the bottom of the filter. You would first have to create a baffle and seal it to the walls of the unit to direct flow to the bottom of the unit, and then water could flow from bottom to top. Here you can see the water entering the media chamber at the top. If you simply stuff sponge in this chamber, water will take the path of least resistance following the shortest line to the right and out the front. Only the top portion of foam would be seeing any flow.. Here you see the basket directing flow to the bottom of the media chamber. here you see a hopeless task. You are trying to get all the flow through these small openings up through foam that quickly gets blocked by debris. Even if it doesnt the water has a choice between going through these holes and up through media, or…. going through this honking big hole that as provided simply has a mesh bag of Matrix behind that hole. And that gaping hole is millimeters from the outflow. Now if they had that stupid bypass hole on the backside, at least the water would have to go through and around the matrix on its way to the outflow. my nagging suspicion is the original prototype did not have that hole and it was put in after the fact cause the fool thing overflowed the top of the basket within hours of being turned on. to make this work without the basket you would need to construct a baffle to direct water down to the bottom of the chamber. more hassle than it is worth to me…. Now lets compare and contrast. The Tidal 35 basket on the left has 7 slots 1 inch long 1/8 of an inch wide.. ideally you want all the flow to go through those slots and up through the prefilter coarse foam, a polishing pad perhaps and through matrix and possibly Purigen…. And your doing this with about a 1/4 ounce of pressure per square inch even if the big bypass hole was not there. Water is lazy and decides to flow over the top of the basket instead cause that is an easier path,. Truth be told it would be probably better to do that filtration wise as it would at least flow past the matrix on its way out. Look inside your filter as it is running and look at that vast turbulence by that large cutout right by the outfall. Nearly all your flow is going out that bypass and straight over the outfall not having much contact with filter media… Now compare those meager slots with the deeply corrogated foam eggcrate that all the water is forced through under full pressure with a Fluval 207 canister filter. 48 square inches face dimension, but the eggcrate gives it more surface area with the undulations vs less than 1 square inch on the Tidal 35…. Which one is going to clog up really really fast? Even if you cut out all of those slots at best it gives you 3 square inches… And if you eliminate the basket and construct a baffle to force the water to the bottom of the chamber and stuff it full of foam you have around 8 square inches of surface area. Now granted all the dimensions on the Tidal 110 will be much more than the Tidal 35… but I know it will be far less than even a 207… I know we are all in different places, but personally I would not spend the effort on trying to improve this unit, but rather buy something better… and that doesnt mean it has to be a canister filter either…It can be a better HOB if you really like those more… But, if you do create a baffle, take pics and show us… Edited June 8 by Pepere 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yoshi Posted June 8 Share Posted June 8 (edited) Sorry, I'm editing out my comment. I said it in a moment of bad temper. I apologize if anyone read it and thought I was sticking my oar in where it didn't belong! Edited June 8 by Yoshi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Airborne 82nd Posted June 8 Share Posted June 8 Well thanks this filter was a gift so at this point it is just something to play with it is not the main filter I have a 407. I'm changing the top tray out to pot scrubbers going to do all 4 one at a time a few week apart and keep the big prefilters. Might use the tidal for a hospital tank. I do like the idea of having a backup HOB. Do you know of a good design. This is a 75 gallon tank one Oscar one Pleco no plants. They are going in a 125. But my wife wants the 75 gallon for smaller fish. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pepere Posted June 8 Share Posted June 8 On 6/8/2024 at 12:23 AM, Airborne 82nd said: Do you know of a good design. I don’t have much hands on experience with HOBs. I bought this one when I got back into the hobby as a certain youtube presenter reviewed it saying it was the best and it was so good we should bow down to it. Singing the praises of the bottom to top flow being so much better than back to front as the water goes through much more depth of filter media… but that is only valid if the water is in fact making its way through the media. I also bought an Aqueon quietflow pro. That one also has the motor in the tank. The flow is back to front. Made for cartridges but you can replace with foam. About 20 years ago we started up a tank for my son when he was growing and we had a hob with cartridges and a biowheel. That one was with the motor in the hob and took cartridges. When the power went out you had to re prime it and the wheel would stop spinning often needing fiddling. All three went in to bypass readily…. Aquaclear has a loyal following… though again it needs priming sometimes if the power gets interrupted. Quite simply I am not much of a fan of the hob concept from a hydrodynamic flow perspective. By its very nature you are relying on very small pressures to force the water through the filter media. Ie the water is pumped into a chamber and you are dependant on a very low height differential between flowing through the filter or the water flowing over the filter in a bypass situation. That is why they go into bypass so readily. It doesnt take much debris in the media that imposes enough flow restriction that the water backs up to the point of overflowing the media. At most there is a centimeter of head differential. A coarse prefilter sponge on the intake does a world of good as it filters out an awful lot of larger debris and simply imposes head loss on the flow into the pump chamber without bypassing the prefilter. But, pulling that prefilter out of the tank to clean it without releasing an awful lot of the debris in to the tank is a royal pain… Without question, every pump design has its features and benefits and also downsides. Canister filters can spring a leak and spill an awful lot of water onto the floor. HOBs are not immune from leaking water onto the floor either. Girl talks fish has a video explaining where one she had damaged their hardwood floors when the filter media became clogged. Air driven filtration is not immune from leaking as a siphon can form through the air hose during a power outage. Check valves help protect, but check valves can fail. Placing the air pump on a shelf above the tank can help, but the pump can fall off the shelf, or the hose can become detached from the pump and fall…. Murphy is a very creative and resourceful trouble maker… All filters have trade offs… I like canister filters myself. I like not having any more current carrying conductors in the tank than necessary. Yes there is still a hazard risk with the electricity in the powerhead leaking current in the tank, but the current carrying conductors are separated by a plastic wall and bedded in epoxy. This is worlds different than a hob with pump and wires immersed in tank water especially where those wires are bent and manipulated when you clean out the motor impeller well…. Canisters have loads more media capacity and large prefilter surface area relative to hobs. Restriction through the media imposes a flow restriction rather than a bypass situation. They are much quieter, and only need servicing monthly. If you do service them monthly as recommended by manufacturer they are no wheres near the pain to clean that some youtube presenters have shown on videos when they dont clean them for 6 months or so. Cleaning my Fluval 207 monthly take me around 15 minutes.. I have timed it. I keep spare parts on hand for my canister filter. I have a spare set of hoses, a spare impeller and gasket and o rings and a spare aquastop valve. I replace the impeller and o rings every 6 months as recommended in the owners manual and clean and lube the o ring monthly. I sort of suspect reports of leakage from them might be due to not cleaning and lubing and replacing the o rings every 6 months as recommended. I plan on changing out the hoses at the 2 year mark as a precaution as well… I have tried sponge filters, ugf plates, box filters, hobs, and internal filters the only filters I know of that I havent tried are sumps and the Ziss fluidized media filter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmark285 Posted June 8 Share Posted June 8 (edited) On 6/8/2024 at 12:23 AM, Airborne 82nd said: Do you know of a good design. Yes, the Supreme King Filter 🙂 Minimum bypass issue with this guy, it used multiple siphon tubes to dump water on top of the media, the pump pulled water from the bottom of the filter. Ahh, the good old days:-) I can't make any recommendation but what I would look for OR how I may mod my Tidal. This is an ancient Whisper filter I used on a grow out tank, the pump didn't work so I just attached a small pump to the intake pipe. Since I was already washing filter socks from another tank in the washing machine, I bought 100 Micron Felt Filter Pad, cut it to size and clipped it on the blue frame shown below: So this has the back to front water flow Pepere talks about and the filter pad works great for mechanical filtration. But it worked too good and needed to be replace every 5-7 days as once it became clogged, the water would just bypass the pad. So what I would look for in a HOB filter, back to front water flow where I can easily pull out and replace the felt filter pad without disturbing the bio filter section. I would just use plastic scrub pads for the bio media. The Fluval C series HOB filter may work but it is expensive and has questionable reviews. The motor is outside the tank just like the Aqua Clear. Not sure about other HOB design. EDIT: Has anyone used the Penn-Plax Cascade 300 Power Filter? Edited June 8 by madmark285 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nabokovfan87 Posted June 8 Share Posted June 8 On 6/7/2024 at 4:11 PM, Airborne 82nd said: Ok I'm trying to understand the idea of removing the basket. Now I can build a 1/2 inch plastic stand off and cut foam to fit tight. I can't picture how the water is going to get under the foam. I thought the water runs down that large notch area on the front of the basket? Or is that notch a bypass channel? I can not get the water flow direction in my mind. Can someone explain this? I would love to try it. You can't really remove the basket because it has a chute that directs the water to the bottom of the housing. People have cut it and glued it into the housing, but ultimately you're stuck with the basket for that reason. On 6/8/2024 at 2:29 AM, Pepere said: All filters have trade offs… 100%. There is no perfect filter. They all have some pretty ridiculous flaws. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nabokovfan87 Posted June 8 Share Posted June 8 On 6/7/2024 at 9:23 PM, Airborne 82nd said: Well thanks this filter was a gift so at this point it is just something to play with it is not the main filter I have a 407. I'm changing the top tray out to pot scrubbers going to do all 4 one at a time a few week apart and keep the big prefilters. Might use the tidal for a hospital tank. I do like the idea of having a backup HOB. Do you know of a good design. This is a 75 gallon tank one Oscar one Pleco no plants. They are going in a 125. But my wife wants the 75 gallon for smaller fish. Check out my tidal thread and simple follow "phase 1" modifications. That's about the bare minimum and goes a long way towards reducing issues. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
svachon9 Posted June 11 Author Share Posted June 11 On 6/7/2024 at 7:56 PM, Pepere said: here you see a hopeless task. You are trying to get all the flow through these small openings up through foam that quickly gets blocked by debris. Even if it doesnt the water has a choice between going through these holes and up through media, or…. going through this honking big hole that as provided simply has a mesh bag of Matrix behind that hole. And that gaping hole is millimeters from the outflow. Now if they had that stupid bypass hole on the backside, at least the water would have to go through and around the matrix on its way to the outflow. So would you recommend simply plugging up the "big hole" with a solid piece of plastic like nabokovfan87 recommends? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
svachon9 Posted June 11 Author Share Posted June 11 I have stuffed 1 2" 40PPI sponges and 1 I think it's 30PPI sponge and a bio bag, that comes with the filter. Is that too much? Is that perhaps why I'm plugging up so quickly? I am also considering 2 mods recommended by nbokovfan87.- cutting bigger holes in bottom and plugging up the big overflow hole at the top of the basket. My goal is to only clean this guy once every month or two and still provide enough bacteria colony with some mechanical filtration also. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pepere Posted June 11 Share Posted June 11 (edited) On 6/11/2024 at 10:54 AM, svachon9 said: I am also considering 2 mods recommended by nbokovfan87.- cutting bigger holes in bottom and plugging up the big overflow hole at the top of the basket. The very first thing I would do is put a coarse prefilter sponge on the intake and fill in the grill on the surface skimmer. This will prevent debris from coming inside the filter and blocking those small intake holes.. also at least here on the prefilter you will never have bypass or overflow. All of the water being moved by the filter has to pass through it. It wont give much on mechanical filtration due to the coarseness, but fine pore prefilter sponge will clog in a week. Medium may or may not go a month. A large prefilter on the intake with skimmer will probably provide more biofiltration than the whole rest of the filter even after modifications… you could cut bigger holes in the bottom. You could open up a decent hole in the bavpck near the bottom which would likely be my move if fo some reason this was the only functioning filter I could get my hands on… and yes block off the large hone near the top. with that large hole on the top closed off you might be going in to overflow situation with just holes in the bottom of the basket which is why I would consider a bigger hole on bottom back of the basket… And if mods are completed and it doesnt perform as you like, you can always buy something else. Edited June 11 by Pepere Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Galabar Posted June 11 Share Posted June 11 On 6/8/2024 at 4:39 AM, madmark285 said: Yes, the Supreme King Filter 🙂 Minimum bypass issue with this guy, it used multiple siphon tubes to dump water on top of the media, the pump pulled water from the bottom of the filter. Ahh, the good old days:-) I can't make any recommendation but what I would look for OR how I may mod my Tidal. This is an ancient Whisper filter I used on a grow out tank, the pump didn't work so I just attached a small pump to the intake pipe. Yup. You can't beat that top to down motion. These were great. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anodyne99 Posted June 11 Share Posted June 11 (edited) I would fill it with dish scrubbers or super coarse sponge and put a clump of floss right in the front. Then I would just be super irritated every time I looked at it, but it would probably get the job done. Edited June 11 by anodyne99 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
svachon9 Posted June 11 Author Share Posted June 11 On 6/8/2024 at 3:41 PM, nabokovfan87 said: Check out my tidal thread and simple follow "phase 1" modifications. That's about the bare minimum and goes a long way towards reducing issues. I'd like to try to fill in the slots on the skimmer with silicone as you recommended. My problem is it seems silicone can dry in 1-2 hours but says completely dry in 24 hours. I think the bacteria would be ok to wait underwater in a bucket for maybe 2 hours but not 24. Do you think I could get away with a 2 hour dry time on the silicone? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pepere Posted June 11 Share Posted June 11 You can throw an airstone in the bucket and the media will be fine. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
svachon9 Posted June 11 Author Share Posted June 11 On 6/11/2024 at 5:58 PM, Pepere said: You can throw an airstone in the bucket and the media will be fine. Fine for 24 hrs? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pepere Posted June 11 Share Posted June 11 On 6/11/2024 at 7:41 PM, svachon9 said: Fine for 24 hrs? When I face a power outage that is likely to last over a day, I shut down my canister filters and put the media in buckets with air stones to keep the bacteria alive as a single air pump uses a whole lot less power than 3 canister filters…. 3 watts vs 30 watts… After lutting them back in service I have not seen any ammonia or nitrite spikes, so my guess is that the bacteria has done fine. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nabokovfan87 Posted June 15 Share Posted June 15 On 6/11/2024 at 3:26 PM, svachon9 said: Do you think I could get away with a 2 hour dry time on the silicone? Dry time is normally 3-4 days. On 6/11/2024 at 3:58 PM, Pepere said: You can throw an airstone in the bucket and the media will be fine. Yep! You can throw it in the base of the tank and just run an air stone as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Airborne 82nd Posted June 15 Share Posted June 15 Could you just run the filter without the skimmer and intake tube? At the most Tywrap a course sponge over the impeller area. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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