whats a good canister filter for my 45g reef

[donkey77]

whats a good canister filter for my 45g reef, i dont what to run a skimmer just 10% water change every sunday. thanks all

[Proteus]

What kind of reef. Ime canisters are nitrate factories if not maintained

[e46er]

they are more work than anything else
what were you planning to put in it?
Im assuming sumpless?

save money hang reactors off the back of the tank for carbon and GFO
your rock, and those 2 things will keep your reef looking nice

[donkey77]

its the deep sea aquatics neo nano 34g, 25g sump, vortec mp10, two little fishes phosban reactor, AI del sol led, 34lbs LR, 30lbs live sand, 4 fish and corals, blastos, zoos, ect. i do water changes every sunday , all i have in my sump is some black sponge filter ,and of course all the other stuff heater, etc
should i have better filtration cause iam getting this long skinny brown alge, my take is about a month old, i got cured LR and sand from an established system, anyways any help thanks

[nitro069]

titus is right about them being nitrate factories if not maintained. that being said i ran a fluval 405 on my 60 gallon and found it to work quite well. it gave good flow in my tank. I used the stock media that came in it though there may be better choices. When i cleaned mine i would clean it using the water i removed from the tank to save anything that was living in my filter. (after a while there was a fair amount in there). If you use fresh water to clean it, don't clean all the media at once. do it in sections. this is how i did mine- week one hit your sponges, week two do your bio balls, week three do your ceramic noodles, week 4 change your carbon.
clean it once a week when you do your water changes, remove any dieatrus(sp) sitting at the bottom of the filter.
Hope this helps

[nitro069]

its the deep sea aquatics neo nano 34g, 25g sump, vortec mp10, two little fishes phosban reactor, AI del sol led, 34lbs LR, 30lbs live sand, 4 fish and corals, blastos, zoos, ect. i do water changes every sunday , all i have in my sump is some black sponge filter ,and of course all the other stuff heater, etc
should i have better filtration cause iam getting this long skinny brown alge, my take is about a month old, i got cured LR and sand from an established system, anyways any help thanks

That long skinny brown algea is prob a diatom bloom. does it have bubbles attached to it?? with your tank being that young it is to be expected. it will go away in time. frequent water changes and gfo in a reactor will help. i used rowaphos when i was having a diatom bloom and it helped lots but now use brs gfo. when mine got real bad and i couldnt get it to go away i did a three days light out and it helped.

edit-just noticed u said you got used live rock and sand. when ever i stir up my sand or have changed tanks i will get a small to medium cycle and a diatom bloom. all that crap from the sand gets into the water column and raised the phosphate levels. It sucks but stick with the water changes and use phosphate remover and it will fix itself.

Are you using ro/di water for your water changes. if not that is going to be something your going to want to do. it is highly recommended that salt water tanks use a water source with 0 total dissolved solids.

[donkey77]

i two iam using rowaphos , iam using ro water,and no bubble attach to that alge

[nitro069]

i two iam using rowaphos , iam using ro water
Is the ro water run through a Deionization stage. if not theres still a good chance you have some tds in your water

[donkey77]

no Deionization i wander if i need a new membrain filter

[nitro069]

no Deionization i wander if i need a new membrain filter

Depends on the age of the membrane. should be good for about 3 years depending on the input water. typically i have found my membrane (even when brand new) leaves about 5 ppm tds. the dioonization will remove the rest of it.

(not sure if im allowed to post links but)
Here is a link to a good system to ensure you have good clean water for a reasonable price.

http://www.bulkreefsupply.com/brs-4-stage-value-plus-ro-di-system-75gpd.html

It includes a tds meter so you can keep an eye on the quality of the output water

[asylumdown]

+1 on canister filters being more trouble than they're worth in a reef tank. To keep it properly maintained you'd need to be thoroughly cleaning the sponges/pre-filters in your canister filter each time you did a water change, and i have yet to see a canister filter on the market where that process is easy enough that you'd be happy to do it weekly on a long term basis.

In my first reef I ran a fluval fX5 in addition to my sump, but more because I had one from my old freshwater tank than because I needed it. Draining, cleaning and re-assembling that sucker was awful.

Even smaller canister filters are giant pain, since they're almost never placed where they're easy or convenient to get to, almost always make a giant mess when you open them, and are heavy and cumbersome to move when they're filled with water. They can turn a single water change in to a 1-2 hour affair.

Also, calling them a filter can be sort of misleading. If by filter you mean manually removing solid material and converting it efficiently in to nitrate, then, yes, that's exactly what they do. If you're having algae problems, it's usually (but not always) because you've got too much of the end product of the nitrogen cycle floating around in your tank. Canister filters are designed almost entirely to facilitate the nitrogen cycle, so by their very nature they run a serious risk of making algae problems worse. In a normal reef tank, uneaten food and fish poo gets eaten before it can break down in to ammonia by the scavengers you both paid for, and hitchhiked in on your rocks. And their waste in turn gets eaten by something smaller. But at each step of the process, a certain amount of the nitrogen and other nutrients gets locked up in the biomass of whatever just ate it. The end result will always be ammonia and other nitrogenous waste, but if it works it's way down the conveyor belt of scavenging animals beforehand, the amount of ammonia that becomes available to the nitrogen cycle will be greatly reduced. Canister filters skip all of that by just sucking up the uneaten food and fish poo, where it gets trapped in the filter material, rots, and immediately breaks down in to nitrogenous waste.