Equipment Review and Discussion :: BEST FILTER FOR TURTLE TANKS

[JAntonio]

Hi Everyone,

I want to share the best filter I've encountered for any indoor turtle habitat.

BACKGROUND
I've had RES for seven years. Started with a baby turtle (male) in a 10 gal tank. Used the overhead filter that came with the tank. Had to make weekly water changes. As the turtle grew, water quality became an issue. I bought the ZooMed 501 canister filter. This worked for a while, but it was also burdensome to clean out the filter and the tank weekly. I moved the turtle to a 50gal tank that a neighbor gave me, and bought a Rena Filstar XP (for up to 175 gal tank) following the 3x rule for canister filters. This worked great. I could change the water and clean out the filter monthly. I acquired a second RES (female). The Filstar worked fine with the two turtles. Eventually the Filstar broke, and I decided to buy a new filter.

I found the best canister filter for sale on Ebay and got the Fluval XP5. That is what I call a filter!! It worked great. The female got to be 9 in and the male 5 in.

I moved and decided to design my own tank and had it custom made. The tank is 100gal, and it is much wider than a fish tank.

This new tank brought more filtration challenges! I googled filters for weeks and finally found the wet/dry filter. Note that this filter cannot be bought. It has to be made.

This is a picture of the filter:

The filter is a fishtank with three compartments. The first compartment contains what I call the sock for mechanical filtration. A power head inside the tank will pump water down through a PVC pipe into the filter. Attached to the PVC pipe is the sock. This will filter out large particles. Because of the way the way the compartments are divided, the water has to go through filtration media before reaching the second compartment.

The second compartment has pouches of activated carbon and zeolite chips to remove odors, ammonia and other chemicals. It also has a UV light filter. This helps controlling algae and other microorganisms.

The third compartment has another power head that pumps the clean water back to the tank.

What I love about this filter is that it keeps the water crystal clear, it's low-maintenance and the tank only needs ocasional water changes.

The only thing I have to do is clean the sock every week, but this is easy!. I will just rinse it out and put it in the washing machine (without soap!). This is the easiest way, but you can wash it by hand without any detergents if you don't want to put it in the washing machine. About once a month, the filter will need to be scrubbed with a sponge because some particles stick to the walls and the UV light.

This is a lot easier than cleaning a canister filter!!

Please ask questions!

[steve]

Looks interesting. How big is the filter? How strong is the pump?

[devilduck]

I'm contemplating going this route in the near future with a spare 20g tank I have sitting around. I'd add as much biomedia as the middle chamber in there will hold. Have you done a power outage test? Will the sump restart automatically when the power goes out?

[Eltemp]

I agree best filter. I have one also and once they are set up they are easy to maintain. What uv filter do you use?

[ljapa]

I have something similar, a refugium. I turned the less than ideal 55 gallon tank I bought with the Craigslist stand into a filter.

I just have a 55 gallon tank and I have/had a Fluval 406 canister filter. But I was stuck with this scratched 15 year old 55 gallon tank that I couldn't give away--I tried.

I divided it into three chambers. The first has about two gallons of biomedia. The last contains a return pump. The middle area is a planted refugium with a few fish, red cherry shrimp, plants, snails and a deep sand bed. My turtle gets some freshly grown plants (amazon sword, anacharis and duckweed) and the occasional thrill of the chase from some shrimp. I get powerful filtration ( once I added the duckweed, my nitrates stayed at 10 or below, even the few times I went two weeks between water changes), an even water level in the main tank that means all hard water stains are above the plastic rim where they can't be seen, and much less stressful water refills during changes because it all goes into the return chamber.

The way Tobi eats her veggies, there's no way I could keep live plants in her tank. But the live plants mean even if I screw up the biofiltration, the plants are there to suck up excess ammonia, nitrites and nitrates. Plus, that extra growth just gets recycled as turtle food.

I've had it for a bit over a year and made it through one power outage when I wasn't home without dumping water all over the floor. Of course, it's in my basement. I'm not sure I'd be as comfortable if it was in the living room.

[VeipaCray]

You certainly can buy a sump / wetdry filter. I had made one for my reef tank then replaced it with an Aqueon Proflex 4. http://www.aqueonproducts.com/products/proflex-sump.htm
Additional pics in my build thread.

I usually use pure non-scented bleach when I wash my filter socks in the machine. They are then soaked in a Prime + RO water mixture after they come out of the washing machine then left to dry out completely before use in my sump. My proflex sump takes 3 filter socks so I have 12 of them. I change out a set of 3 socks every week.

The problem with the sump in freshwater tanks is that the waste sinks in the display tank. Water enters the sump through an overflow in the display tank, down into the sump and then back up to the display tank. In marine tanks, waste and proteins float because of the SG of the salt water. They are easily skimmed off the surface by an overflow and dealt with by the sump.

In a freshwater the SG is 0 and the waste sinks to the bottom of the display tank. For a planted tank, leaving the waste sink to the bottom is desirable because it becomes plant fertilizer.

In a freshwater turtle tank you have no way of removing the waste unless you constantly siphon your substrate. A large canister filter does a much better job with a turtle tank than the sump does from this regard. Trust me, if the sump were better I'd go buy another reef ready tank and sump tonight. I love how sumps work but they just don't do a stellar job of keeping a turtle tank clean. It doesn't matter if you buy or build your sump... turtle poop sinks in freshwater. :/ Doing a combination of mechanical filtration via a canister + a sump/refugium like ljapa is doing is great if you want to have the extra filtration capacity, have a small planted refuge + a place to put the heater outside of the display tank. A sump as the sole source of filtration in a turtle tank is easily beaten by a large oversized canister IMO. I find cleaning a canister much easier than cleaning a sump & still having to siphon the substrate every other day or so. That's a LOT of work.

[Eltemp]

I was thinking of trying to add a power head at the bottom of the tank to dump it down to my wet dry filter. Wonder if this would be enough to try and help with the sinking turtle waste.

[ljapa]

I find cleaning a canister much easier than cleaning a sump & still having to siphon the substrate every other day or so. That's a LOT of work.

Wait, you are supposed to clean your sump?

I second everything VeipaCray said. The only time Tobi's waste floats is when she gets too much lettuce, and the few times that happens, the overflow doesn't deal with it because it's too big to fit through the strainer.

I love the refugium. I love the excess biofiltration I get from added biomedia and plants. I love that I can feed fresh vegetable matter--including duckweed which is a food RES eat in the wild. I love supplying small invertebrates instead of feeder fish for a stimulating meal.

However, most of Tobi's waste sinks. I don't have to tell any of you that it's large too. The canister filter pulls most of it in. That gets cleaned once a month. I don't really do much cleaning in the refugium. I do wipe down the front glass so I can see, but the shrimp eat the biofilm that forms on the rest. The rear glass that gets the light has a nice healthy green spot algae coating. The main tank glass gets wiped down every other week, and the only issue I have there is the occasional blue green algae, which I could probably control by removing the tank light.

[Eltemp]

I was looking at hydroponic systems last night. the fish tank in it had an overflow system in it to suck out the waste to feed it to the plants. It had a tee at the overflow location with a pipe going down to the bottom so all water moved out was drawn from the bottom where the solids settled. Using this method you could suck the solids from the bottom when they setteled without using an actual siphon since the tee was open to the top so no actual siphon could be made and it would just overflow. this would correct the does not float since it's not a saltwater system.

[VeipaCray]

Did you take any pictures you could share?

[Eltemp]

Here is a plan of one. The one i seen was working and in a tank on a youtube video.


I already modified my intake to be similar to this. Any solids on the bottom i can already see them moving toward the intake. So far it seems like it is working but it will take a bit more time to watch it and see how it works.

[Eltemp]

Here found a pic of one

[steve]

I'm curious as to how it will work. My two turts produce waste that are inconsistent to each other, I wonder if there can be a better solution.

[VeipaCray]

OK that makes sense. That will be a loud drain and will surge a bit.

IF that bottom inlet gets gunked up, are there holes in the vertical standpipe to prevent overflow?

The other thing you can do with a sump is have one of these drains on either side of the tank both feeding the sump.

Now you just need a way to match your return pump to the speed of the drain (unless your pump is much slower than the drain). You can put a gate valve in the drain. You can also put a T fitting in the return plumbing from your pump and route half the T to another gate valve and back into the sump. Don't put a valve directly in-line with the return pump as this causes stress on the pump.

Please let us know how this works for you when it's up and running.

[Eltemp]

i added slits at the top incase the bottom plugs. it is not actually all that loud. My return line is already set up like that and I have a 1" intake for the return and there is a little surging