The eheim wet and dry filter am i buying a gimmik??You're views and experience please and the facts thanks guys..

Have you actually sealed the deal yet? I don't want to put a downer on things but these Eheim wet dry filters are not suitable for tanks where you keep very messy fish like Oscars.

Let me explain why. A wet dry filter is also known as a trickle filter. They are different from your traditional canister filter. A normal canister filter will be full of water all the time, the canister will be sucking water in and putting it back into the tank at an equal rate. The Eheim wet dry filter doesn't quite work like this. Rather than being full of water all the time, the water enters the filter, trickles through the trays of media and fills up gradually, normally takes around a minute to fill up completely. Once is completely full, the water is then expelled back into the tank and the process starts over again. The bacteria that live in the media can only survive if oxygen is present. So basically, intermittently exposing them to open air, rather than them being submerged in water all the time can actually improve the bacteria and make them more beneficial. That's probably the easiest way of explaining it.

These are normally used on saltwater tanks where the fish don't produce anywhere near the kind of waste that messy fish like Oscars do. What happens is a lot of waste builds up in the media and the water cannot trickle through the media as quickly. You'll find that after a week or two, the filter will gradually start slowing up. So rather than the whole process taking 45 seconds to complete, it can be as long as five minutes, even longer depending on how much waste is in the filter. There's nothing stopping you from using them, just be aware that you will probably have to clean them once a week, rather than every few weeks with a normal canister filter.

There are two good reasons for using a canister filter, the first is you can pack loads of biological/mechanical media into them. The second is you can leave them for quite long periods in between cleaning. However, not with an Eheim wet dry filter unfortunately.

I used to have two Eheim wet dry filters and I got rid of both of them because of this problem.

It was to run along side a fx5 on my channa micropeltes tank but i think ill just get another fx5. thanks penn!!

I would definitely discourage anyone from using Eheim wet dry filters with Oscars. Now the FX five is a different ball game altogether, fantastic filtration, congratulations