Hello there, welcome back. In this particular episode of Pimp My Filter, we're going to be taking a look at this, which is the Eheim Echo Pro 300. So let's not waste any time. We'll take the top off and I'll show you how it works and what comes with it. Okay, to get this open, you tilt this forward, press that in and that disengages the lock and allows the top to come off. So that's our Pimp section. Okay, now what happens with this is the water comes in, it then goes around here. This is like a pre-filter form. See that, it's like in a ring. So the water goes through there first and then it goes all the way around outside of the main trays down to the bottom and then the water rises up through the trays, through here. So it comes out the middle and then it's sucked up by the pump, spat back out to the tank. So we've got pre-filter tray. That sits under the pre-filter tray and that allows the water to come back up through the center of the pre-filter tray, note to our pump, but it serves a dual purpose. It also spreads the water out on the way into the filter and down the sides of the trays. And then we've got three trays. I like these because they're locked together. So they've got a top tray and that comes with just a fine part in. Next tray down comes with nothing in and then the tray down from that comes with like a mechanical stroke bio-media. That's meant to settle out all of the muck. So that is a pretty good cartridge sort of a system. You know what all locks together and I like that. I really do like that. Just enables you to remove it easily. Okay, I probably made it a little bit easier to see what's going on. What it hits this around the outside first. So it comes out through the underneath of there. Down the side of here, up through the trays, back out the middle. Now as it's set up now really all it needs is some media and the suggestion is that you put the filter media under here. So you put a little bit in there. And then you fill that trio with filter media. There's a massive problem there because if this pad is the last thing that the water hits before leaving the filter all the fine muck is going to get concentrated in your bio-media. It's going to clog up very very quickly and it's going to be very very inefficient. We need all of our mechanical filtration to be done before the water hits the media. So here's how we rectify that situation. First of all we get rid of this plastic stuff. Plastic media has no place whatsoever in a filter unless it's moving. If it's a moving bed it's okay because it supports very vigorous bacteria. If it's static really all of this is a mechanical media. So we're going to leave this ring, this pre-filter ring as it is. We can't really do much with that and it does catch quite a lot of the heavy muck that comes into the filter first. We're going to use the fine pad in a moment but we're going to concentrate on this bottom tray first. And we're going to cut a coarse foam for the bottom tray. That's our coarse foam. It's one of the pond filter forms with the dimples on. Dimples go down. That's it. So the water's going to come up and hit the dimple side first. Then we're going to go with a medium form. That is a medium density foam. So while the black one was quite open-poured this one is slightly tighter so it's going to catch the medium density muck. So that one again dimples side down. We might just get the fine pad on top of there and then on top of that yeah I'll go in. Our fine pad. So that's our very bottom tray. Cores medium fine. That'll squash in no problem. And now that leaves us two trays for media. Happy days to simple setup. And into the media trays we're going to put the old faithful biomeultimate. Yeah we'll get more than that in. Yeah because this water distributor sort of column attachment that goes on the top has got about an inch to play with when that goes on the top. We do have room to kind of heap the media up in this tray. The tray underneath needs a pretty flat very level. This one can be heaped up a little bit. Yeah we'll easily get that in there. And on top of that we can put the carbon pad that comes with the filter. That goes on top of there. Yeah that's a good fit. So now when the water hits our pre filter goes down the side of the trays up through coarse medium fine foam. Then it goes through two trays of filter media. And then it goes through the carbon pad. So we've got a mechanical biological chemical filtration in the right order. Drop that back in there. That in there. Top on. And we're ready to go. Now according to Eheim's website this particular filter is for aquariums up to 300 litres or in the real world for aquariums of about 160 litres. Now we managed to get approximately hold on hold on hold on. This room for more media in here. Yes indeed there is a little bit just in here. We're going to get a few more bits of biopulm in. And then we like to see any wasted space in a filter. Yeah this may be another 150 grams in there not much. Every little helps. Okay so with that extra little bit of media in there we've got, oh let's say each tray held roughly 650 grams so that's 1300 grams 1.3 kilos 1.4 kilos possibly if you pack it in neatly up to 1.5 kilos in here. And for a normally stock tank of 160 litres which is what they're recommend them 1.5 ish kilos is about right by the time you take into account your substrate that knocks the liturage off your tank and also your ornaments and so on they all eat into the liturage that's actually in your tank. So that is sized correctly according to Eheim's website. Eheim are the only company to get this right. All the other companies will say our filter does up to 300 litres but 300 litres of what they say for aquariums of about 160 litres so they're basically halving it which is what I've said so many times in my previous videos. Eheim do it right. Not too happy with the way the filter actually came set up but the size the filter is right based on a being set up properly like it is now. So that was a really easy one to do. There was no drilling, there was no cutting any slits in it, there was no alterations to do really it was just a simple matter of setting it up correctly. If you've enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up if you want to see me do one of your filters then by all means get in touch my contact e-l's are in the video description UK only though because it costs a fortune to send this abroad. Yeah if you want to share it anywhere if you think anybody else might benefit from watching this by all means share it anywhere you want on the internet and I shall see you next time. Thanks for watching.