Aquarium filtration is vital to an aquarium’s success. Your aquarium filtration system needs to be functioning properly to ensure that your fish remain healthy.
However, just what is aquarium filtration all about?
Lots of people believe that filtration is a process that involves a random machine in the tank, and also cleaning the tank twice a month. This is not enough to guarantee the health of your fish.
Mechanical Filtration – This is what most of us see when we look at a typical aquarium: a mechanical pump that sucks water, screens it using some fine material or cloth to sift the water, and then releases that water back into the tank to aerate the water. Finer filter material is more effective but also gets clogged more quickly. So unless your fish tank’s problems are severe, you want a filter screen that is both efficient and permeable.
Mechanical aquarium filtration serves to filter out the solid particles like waste and grit from the water. This in itself is important, and definitely cannot be overlooked in your tank’s cleanliness. We have to look beyond what we can see and look at the invisible problems plaguing a typical fish tank aquarium.
Water, especially water that comes from the tap, has certain compounds that get dissolved in it. When highly concentrated enough in the water, these compounds build up and can become potentially toxic to your fish.
Chemical aquarium filtration involves using high-grade ‘granular activated carbon’ to absorb these dissolved compounds. Certain materials are super-heated at 2000-degrees Fahrenheit, and the resulting material is then void of gases due to the super-heating process. Water, especially water that comes from the tap, has certain compounds that get dissolved in it.
Unfortunately, these carbons won’t be around permanently: compounds will overwhelm them over time, and eventually you’ll want to get new ones. Some stores that sell supplies for aquaria will make the claim that the job can be done effectively with charcoal, but it is much more effective to use activated carbon for absorption of these compounds.
Biological Filtration – As your fish go about the business of living their day-to-day lives, the respiration and waste-production process will produce a certain substance: ammonia. Ammonia is produced from decaying organic matter and becomes dangerous at high levels and toxic to fish when it builds up too long in the tank, unfortunately, the filtration type that commands the least attention.
This is what most of us see when we look at a typical aquarium: a mechanical pump that sucks water, screens it using some fine material or cloth to sift the water, and then releases that water back into the tank to aerate the water. A type of bacteria, Nitrosomonas, will first eat up this ammonia and turn it into nitrite. This nitrite is still toxic to fish, and it has to be processed by Nitrobacter bacteria to produce the nitrate.
If there aren’t enough of these bacteria, new fish owners can discover that their fish have died. This is the reason that you should buy cheaper, low-risk test fish to ‘break in’ the aquarium for the mor expensive fish. Because you still require a mixture of Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter to operate and properly filter your tank this is the primary reason that not every bit of water gets removed with cleansing the tank.
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