Hello there, in this video I am going to very quickly show you how I set an external filter up with media and forms to get the most use out of it to make it the most efficient, possible container that it can be. Basically, external filters are all pretty much the same. There is a pump in here which sucks water from the tank. The filter is it through a series of forms and media and blows it back out back to the tank clean. This one is an eheim professional tube. Now I bought this one second hand and this is exactly how it came set up. It's got that waste of time in the top there. It's worse than useless ceramic media. Very smooth in there. And there's a couple of one or two forms in there. One huge course form in the bottom. So now I am going to show you how to make this very efficient. First of all, the form was in the bottom, that's correct. But there's only one course form. Any fine particles are going to travel up through the media and clog up all the pores in the media. So first thing to do is sort out the forms in this bottom tree. Actually, before I do that, when this tree is slotted in, you've got a gap in the bottom of approximately two inches. Now when the water comes down here, this void is I think it's meant to collect all the heavy but that swirls around. If it swirls around too much, it gets clogged on the bottom of your form. So what you can do is tip a little bit of this heavy, crappy ceramic media in the bottom of your. Just about make it out there. And what this does, it'll diffuse the floor. So the floor coming down through the central pipe won't just swish around quickly and then hit the forms. It'll get diffused. The heavy muck will settle out a lot better. Within all these gaps, within these little tubes here. So here we've got two heavy forms. No need to have two heavy ones. Now we've got two separate forms. This one can be kept as a spare. Put that one off to the side. This one goes back in the filter. Goes in like that in the very bottom. So after the water comes down and hits this primary settlement chamber which is now filled with the heavy ceramic media, it'll hit this. This will strain out the heavy muck. This piece of pond foam is reticulated in that it's got loads of little bumps on it, provides a lot more surface area, but it isn't as coarse as this original foam. So I'm going to use this original foam to create a template and cut out a piece of this medium foam. Yeah, that's not bad. Pretty much the same as that one. So that one will go in first, then that one. And in the very top I'm going to put a fine foam, a fine particle mat. Most people would be thinking at this particular point that's totally wrong. The fine one needs to go in the top, the very last thing in the filter, but that's wrong because your fine pad will take out the very fine particles before the water hits your media and that's super important. The water that hits the media needs to be as clean as possible as far as particulate matter goes. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how good the media is used, it's just going to become clogged very quickly with muck. So here I've got another pond mat. This one's just called fine particle matten. You get a big sheet of this, it's only £3.99 or something. And it can actually split it down to make it as thick or as thin as you want. So that's not very square that one, but I'm sure it'll be okay. So in this bottom tray, we're going to have coarse foam, medium foam, fine foam, fine. There you go. Three layers of foam, coarse, medium, fine. All mechanical filtration done before the water leaves this bottom tray. Drop that in, forget about it. The remainder of this stuff, throw it away or keep it for spare. Not that this other stuff's ever going to run out. Seems to shim the throw away. This stuff might as well go on the fire. In fact, it might light the fire quite well. So now two trays left. These two go above the foam trays and these two are going to be filled with high quality media. Now in this particular instance, I'm using bio-home mini ultra. I'll just give you a quick close-up on that. That's it there. Possibly the best filter media you can get. It's a scented glass media, ridiculous surface area. That's super close-up now and I'm going to dip the bio-home mini ultra in just the tip. Wush. See the water flying up there? To my fingers now. That's how quickly water finds all the nukes and crannies in this media. It's absolutely awesome. That's one tray more or less full and that's a kilo of media. One tray dough just over a kilo of media. And really there's no point mixing up any other sort of media. Your forms are doing the mechanical filtration. Your filter media is doing the biological cleaning. So just fill up the next tray with the same stuff. No point mixing different types of media. People do it all the time. I can't see the point. If you have efficient forms, that sorts out all the heavy muck. Your media sorts out your ammonia and nitrite. And in the case of the bio-home range of medias, because they have a large protected internal surface area, they also reduce nitrate as well. So you've got the full process of filtration. Happen them in this little box which sits outside your aquarium. So your last tray drops in. Nearly forgot to put this feller in. Goes in there. And now you've got a filter which is many more times efficient than if you'd used crappy media and you had the forms in the wrong place. Most filters will come with a form in the top. All that does, it concentrates all the muck that's in the water. In these sections here, clogs your filter media up means that they can't do their job. It really reduces the efficiency of your filter. This way you've got primary settlement, coarse medium fine forms to filter out coarse medium and fine muck in the water. And then you've got your biological filter media. Some of the newer filters come with a pre-filter which is like a coarse foam. That'll be located either on here before the water went down or in a separate chamber here. To me that's absolutely pointless because to maintain that, you've still got to take the top off and it's hardly one of the labors of Hercules. To take these out, one, two to get to your forms. That took four, five seconds. Job done, perfect water. Thanks for watching.