hi
I'm new to the forum and hobby. but i have a question last night on here i read that carbon shouldn't be in your filter all the time. so my question is what exactly should i have in my fluval 405 or should i say what is best for a fluval 405?


a little back round on tank i have one 8 inched albino tiger Oscars and 4 convict in a 110 tank. right now i have carbon, bio max, pre filter, and polishing pad in my filter

Remove the carbon and add more Bio max... You can never have enough.

I will tell ya tho, you need another 405 on that tank... you should have filters rated for 220 gallon tank.. Oscars require filters at twice the tank volume!

i agree with nicki.replace the carbon with more bio max and start looking into another 405 for your tank.

Fill all the trays with bio media

You do need another filter. I have 2 405's on my 100g

Does this mean for all or most filters? I have looked into the filter thing and I am going for the FX5 for a 5x2x2 tank. I saw the filter on ebay and it comes with a dvd showing setup from start to finish. The only thing it tells you is that there is NO !! bio media included in the kit only mechanical filtration. cheers.
delboybully wrote:
[quote]Fill all the trays with bio media

Jamie, in my FX5 I have Bio Max in 2 trays, and keep in mind that is 4 boxes of Bio Max, and the rest I have full of the cheap scrubbies.

Now the reason I did this was because the scrubbies not only will host the good bacteria, but they are thick enough to filter out the rest of the crap and they don't easily clog. Another benefit to the scrubbies, is you can take them out, squeeze them out, and put them back. They will last years.

So at the end of the day, the media in my FX5 doesn't need replacing for a very long time!

I saw them boxes of media in the LFS and they wanted £8 something thats $12 bucks a box they will be a lot cheaper on Ebay. The store wanted a fortune for gravel so I went to my local builders merchant and got 25k for £4's. 6mm maximum Golden gravel, it looks great in the tank. lolol

jamesmillar wrote:
[quote]Does this mean for all or most filters? I have looked into the filter thing and I am going for the FX5 for a 5x2x2 tank. I saw the filter on ebay and it comes with a dvd showing setup from start to finish. The only thing it tells you is that there is NO !! bio media included in the kit only mechanical filtration. cheers.
delboybully wrote:


Yes. Buy the FX5 and fill the trays with bio media