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Algae in filter


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Sorry for another silly question. I have what appears to be brown algae growing in my filter. I assume this is just another level of filtration and I shouldn’t really be concerned but that I should double check. Do I need to clean this out of my filter? Do you even need to clean your filter? I know about rinsing out the filter media which I do but do you need to clean the actual filter housing?

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For the most part it should be fine, algae is a plant just like anything on the Aquarium Co-Op website. Although if it starts to impact how much water your filter can clean then I would rinse it in old tank water. Most of the time just rinsing out the media in old tank water is good enough to keep the filter clean. Definitely not an expert in this, people with more experience might have a better answer than me. Good luck!

Edited by FlyingFishKeeper
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If it bothers you you can clean it out with a brush or a wadded up paper towel. It typically cleans up easily. I tend to leave it alone and consider it a biological prefilter. It's sucking up some of the nitrates and other impurities before they hit the main filter. When I get annoyed by it and decide to clean it (almost never these days) I would just take a paper towel, wad it up so it fits tightly into the tube and then push it back and forth in the tube with a wooden dowel or whatever I had that was long enough and the tube would be sparkly clean in a matter of seconds. It's not a hard algae to clean.

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you dont ever need to clean algae off of surfaces. I have a sponge filter like that and I leave it. If you dont like the looks of it get a tooth brush and scrub it off. yes you need to do filter matnience, just squeeze the filter in your dirty tank water after every waterchange.

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