Aquarium Filtration Simplified

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. However, 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. The finer the filter material, the more effective it is at filtering but the more quickly it gets clogged up. So unless you have some serious waste problems in your tank try and find a filter screen that strikes a balance between efficiency and permeability.

Mechanical aquarium filtration serves to filter out the solid particles like waste and grit from the water. This is definitely important to have in mind while evaluating how clean of your fish tank actually is. However, we have to look beyond what we can see and look at the invisible problems plaguing a typical fish tank aquarium.

Chemical Filtration: There are particular compounds that can get dissolved in water, mainly found in tap water. Over time, these compounds will build up since mechanical methods are unable to filter them, and these compounds may reach levels which are poisonous enough to kill your fish.

Chemical aquarium filtration involves using high-grade ‘granular activated carbon’ to absorb these dissolved compounds. Some materials when heated to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, will become void of gases. Since the material doesn’t contain gases, it absorbs the invisible compounds, much like sponges do.

They eventually get saturated with compounds and will need to be replaced over time. Some aquarium shops claim that charcoal will do the job, but it is not nearly as effective as activated carbon in absorbing the said 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.

In order to deconstruct the ammonia that can be found in aquariums into benign nitrate , biological chemical filtration is necessary. A type of bacteria, Nitrosomonas, will first eat up this ammonia and turn it into nitrite. The nitrite is much too harmful to fish, and it also must be processed by Nitrobacter bacteria in order to produce the nitrate.

Bacteria is the entire reason why new fish owners find their fish floating dead on the water. This is not enough to guarantee the health of your fish. We have to look beyond what we can see and look at the invisible problems plaguing a typical fish tank aquarium.