![]() I changed the skimmer sponge to the aquarium Co-Op stuff yesterday when doing maintenance and that seems to have helped. Just a small half inch to one inch waterfall wouldn't do too currently running coarse sponge on the intake tube and over the surface skimmer (bought from Aquarium co-op). I doubt the difference would be much though, you'd need a small waterfall and stream bubbling over rocks to really oxygenate the water significantly I'd wager. The aquaclear may have more oxygenation due to more water fall, but someone would have to test this out. That little ramp helps avoid the water splashing sound if you keep your water level from dropping too much. My aquaclear seems to run louder than my tidal as well. In power outages you would have the aquaclear running dry until you catch it, so there is that. But everytime you shut off the aquaclear to feed the tank it siphons all the water out of the unit and you have to reprime it every time, which is super annoying. Just place the sponge at the bottom, filter floss next, and then biomedia bag ontop that.īoth work well. I have to add some filter floss to the hang on back in order to pull small particulate out of the water. I have noticed that neither really polishes the water at all as sold. Maintenance is easy, it's reliable, and it's probably very popular for anyone who wants the specific features that are completely absent in the aquaclear. Guess it has something to do with how the water exits. It's noisier than the aquaclear equivalent - not the motor per se, but the water turbulence. People have modded theirs by drilling extra holes in the media basket.īecause of the bypass and restriction, you may have to deal with the nagging blue cylinder reminding you, the dumb fishkeeper, to clean the media even if you just cleaned it an hour ago. And a large amount of bypass is basically inevitable at full flow. You have to fill it loosely and lightly if you want to minimize bypass. The media basket is really, really restrictive. I, too, have more floaters in that tank (granted, it's a pleco growout so the feeding never stops) ![]() Because of the skimmer being so prominent, I do think it contributes a lot to the filter's lack of water-polishing ability. ![]() You can't turn it completely off, and there's no out-of-the-box way of adding a prefilter to it. The skimmer seems to be the most effective part of the intake. I have a lot of gripes about the tidal, but some of those gripes may be preferable to others: Those are the three things it has going for it over the aquaclear. It has a very wide range of flow settings making it versatile for different tank sizes, livestock, and filter media. I have it in a 29-gallon pleco growout so that's a big plus. I've been running a Tidal 75 for 5 months now. I have to turn the Tidal off for even a small water change. I could keep the thing running the entire time I did water changes too with the intake extension. Having the debris floating has been so bothersome I'm thinking of going back to my AC and just dealing with repriming. Anyone else have any experience with this? I have coarse sponge attached to the surface skimmer and the intake tube (which I really wish was longer! I had extensions on my AC that got right near the substrate). So I've had the Tidal 55 up and running for about 2-3 weeks now and I have to say I like almost everything about it but I feel like it does a terrible job of actually pulling floating debris out of the water column (which is kind of the whole purpose of having a filter, right?). So I got a Tidal 55 as I had seen very positive things about it and it helps me sleep a little easier knowing a late night power outage won't effect it like it would for the bio filter in my Aquaclear 50.
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