Time to clean the filter

It seems no matter what kind of pet you have, you'll always have to clean up after it and clean its enclosure, whether that's a cage, a terrarium, your whole house, or an aquarium. At least with fish, the mess is 100% contained - and doesn't smell. Don't ask me to clean up after terrestrial creatures, my experience with those is that they all smell. Bleh.

There are really three things to do with an aquarium: clean the glass of algae, change the water/gravel vacuum, and clean the filter. The first two are pretty simple, and if you have sand instead of gravel you don't have to vacuum, as wastes can't get trapped beneath the surface. Cleaning the filter, especially if you have canisters, is where the "ew, gross!" factor arises. I find it helpful to simply not think about what exactly it is that I wash out of my canister filters...

Bucket containing 1/2 inch of fish-produced organic fertilizer!

So having to squeeze solid waste out of my filter sponges can be pretty disgusting, but I've never bothered to use gloves. I have a pair of Rena Filstar XP3s, and this stuff came out of just one of them - I won't do both at the same time, since cleaning a filter is traumatizing to the bacterial colonies that live there, and without the bacteria, water quality will nosedive. Keeping fish means keeping bacteria colonies too! And if you do planted aquaria with yeast CO2 generators, you get to keep fish, bacteria, and fungus. Welcome to the wonderful world of microbiology - I definitely should have taken that class in college!

As for filter media, right now I'm experimenting a bit. I've got the basic set of pads that come with the Rena - two grades of black sponge, and the white polishing pad, but that fills up about 1/3 of an XP3's media capacity. And they're all mechanical - wastes get trapped and have to be washed out. I'd like to come up with some good biological media, preferably without going out and buying the ceramic rings and things they sell as biological media in the pet stores. Folks on Cichlid-forum.com like to recommend plastic pot scrubbing pads, so I'm giving those a try. They have a lot of surface area and seem to let water pass fairly freely through them, which is what I want, but the problem is that they're round, and the media baskets in the Rena XPs are square. The filter floss and sponges that I have are all square, so no water can bypass them rather than flowing through, but water will definitely be bypassing some of the pot scrubber material. Maybe the different flow rates through the mesh will be beneficial, but it seems rather inefficient to me. The pot scrubbers are too large to simply layer, which is how other bio-media seems to get around the issue. I'd like to have both bio and mechanical media in the same filter - that way if I decide to go back to one XP3 on each of my 55s, cleaning the filter will be less likely to cause ecosystem imbalances.

A note on my new filter input/output arrangement: cleaning filters invariably results in a cloud of particulates fouling the aquarium water when the filter is restarted. This cloud cleared out of the water very quickly, faster than it would have with the old, turbulence-causing arrangement. Putting the pipes next to each other passes both the aesthetics and the functionality test!