Pimp My Filter #82 - Sicce Space Eko 200+ Canister Filter Upgrade

Hi there, welcome back. This is another Pimp My Filter video and I think, oh it's got to be into the late 70s, possibly early 80s in that series. It's gone on for quite a while but this is a filter that I've been wanting to have a look at for quite a while because it's quite a cheap one but the inside So let me show you. This one here is the Space Eco Plus Model 200 from CK of it looks interesting. and or Ciche depending on where you're from and how you pronounce it. I'll say CK because it's an Italian filter and obviously Italian comes from Latin. Double C's pronounced. It's not ch. Anyway, enough of that. Yes, I did do Latin at school. Believe it or not. So this is from CK and CK make filters for Seachem. You'll be familiar with their filters, there's our hang on the back filters. Very good and also very easy to upgrade. I think I've got two or three videos on the CK hang on the back filter, sorry the Seachem CK hang on the back filters in this playlist, so I'll link to those in the video description in case you're interested. But this one is an external filter from CK. Now this thing is very low wattage, it only consumes 6 watts of power, which in this day and age of rampant electric price rises, that's definitely a consideration, and the trade-off for that is that the pump only shifts 700 litres per hour. This particular filter is rated for tanks up to 200 litres, or 52 US gallons. Water comes in. It goes down the outside of this big central removable cartridge, as it were, to the bottom, and then rises up through the trays, gets drawn out by the pump, and spat out back to the tank. You may notice that you can see my breath. It's not because my breath is that bad, it's because it's about minus two in this room. Before we get started, I just want to thank Mike for sending me this. He sent me this straight from the place he bought it from, so he hasn't actually seen it yet. He just asked if I wanted to take a look at one of these. So it's taken a little bit of a detour between the cellar and him and it's going to get pimped up, maybe, depending on what we find inside. Okay, so that's the filter. Pretty compact and it's actually quite a nice design. I'll bring the camera in and I will show you what it's like looking from the top down. Inside will rip its guts out and then I'll let you know what I think of it in its present state and I'll show you if there's anything that can be done to it to make it more efficient. Normal setup on the top. We've got four release clasps all the way around here, basically one on each corner. An innie and we've got an outie. And to take that off, you've got quite an interesting way of doing that. Normally you would lift levers up on either side of here. You could take one off or two off. Or if you had a central lever, you would lift both of these out at the same time. But this one has a pull tab here. You just pull that and then lift that out. This might be difficult to see, but there's a little hook in here, so that's it released. And when I push this back in, you should see the little hook come out of here. And that just hooks into a little attachment in the head here. We'll just push it in. There you go, that's the little hook. That's what keeps this thing in position. It's a different way of doing things, but it's a very good way to secure that to the top of the pump. Now, what I've noticed doesn't work quite so well is the removal of this head. Now, the clasps are great quality, really good, nicely made, solid. But this top has a very, a very thick, aggressive seal. It'll probably get easier to lift on and off the more you use it, but initially I had a hell of a job getting this top off. So you may have to forgive me while I rive on with it. That's it. Definitely easier than it was the last few times I've taken it off. So that's our pump head, that's our in and out. Water comes in through this little hole, goes down the outside of those baskets, or that insert. Rises up through the trays, it's drawn out by the pump and spat back to the tank. Just lift this out, that to one side. And in here we've got three trays that just kind of clip together. See that's where the water flows up, that's where it comes out. By twisting the top you lift off the various sections. So in the bottom we've got a big coarse pad. In the next one up we've got another reasonably coarse pad, possibly a little bit finer. And then in our top drear. We've got a little bit of ceramic rings, not much there at all, followed by a polishing pad. And as I've explained probably about 100 times in my previous videos, the fine pad does not want to be on the top. It doesn't want to be the last thing that the water hits. Otherwise, when you fill this up with decent quality media, All the fine muck is going to get stuck behind that pad and it may prematurely clog your media. Your media still will work when it's in muck, but it just means that you've got to clean out this tray, this one's full of muck, the one under here is full of muck. It makes for a really messy job. The good thing about this filter is that everything we need initially to set it up the right way is here. We've got a little bit of space in the bottom and in there I'm going to tip this possibly get almost twice as much in there. So now when our water comes down outside of this cartridge, it goes down the bottom, the heavy muck all settles out in the bottom. Our bottom tray is gonna have the course pad left where it was. Then I'm gonna take the less coarse pad, sit it in there. We'll get that fine one on top as well, maybe, just about. I think that might work, yeah. Just, we've just got all three pads in the bottom of there. Now, when we put this in the filter, all the muck that comes in from the tank is going to be held in the bottom third of the filter. That's important because the media that we're going to put in the next two trays will be operating in clean water. That means that when you pull this thing to bits to clean it out, the media trays should be relatively clean. They'll just need a quick shake. In the bucket of water that you've drained from the tank, the pads just need washing out or replacing as necessary and then you just put the whole thing together, you're not scrubbing media and worried about it clogging, your media will be clean. So basically we'll have the mechanical and then the biological. If we decide to use any carbon pad or carbon granules or any sort of chemical media that would go in the top of this filter because it works from the bottom up. You'd always go mechanical, biological, chemical. In that way that gives your bacteria the chance to draw in trace elements, nutrients, basically everything it needs before the water hits the chemical media. The last thing you want to do is starve the bacteria by putting the chemical media before where all the bacteria lives, before the biological. Now looking at the tank you'd still get the same clear water. But your filter would be less efficient if you were drawing in all the nutrients prior to the water hitting the bacteria. I hope that makes sense, if not check out the video description I will put more information in there. Now I actually wanted to go with bio gravel in here but those holes in the bottom are a little bit too big. I tried some there and some of the smaller pieces actually fell through the outside holes here. Now if you had Substrat Pro from Eheim that's a little bit bigger and it's it's more uniform in its size than the Bio Gravel so that would be a really good one to pack this out. The structure is good as well it's a little bit it's a little bit finer structure than the Bio Gravel and the Bio Home and so on but if you've got plenty of that in It should give you a full cycle, so that is a one I would recommend that isn't a Biohome product. And that one's sold in litres, so you'd get roughly one litre of the Eheim Substrat Pro in each one of these containers. So that's two litres in total. Could have sworn I had some of that Eheim media, but I might have already given that away. Instead I'm going to fill each one of these two trays up with Biohome Ultimate which is what I would normally use in canister filters. When there isn't a square tray I would tend to go for the Bio gravel just because it packs in a lot more surface area within that space. And of course you can mix medias as well, so if you wanted to go with a bit of the Biohome Ultimate mixed in with a little bit of the Eheim stuff to fill in the gaps, go for it, you know, you can mix anything in, even if you wanted to put like ceramic rings or anything else in here, or pumice or something like that, you know, you can, obviously you're going to get different results from different medias, I just go with what I know works, and that's what I like to give back to you guys who send me these filters. Because we're aiming for this filter and ultimately the tank that it's connected to, to achieve a full cycle, which is zero ammonia, zero nitrite, and low, if not zero, nitrate, we're going to go with the BioHome Ultimate in here. So it'll take up to two kilos to fill both of these trays. And for you guys in the US, that will be £4, so you would need £4 of the Biohome Ultimate to fill two trays of this filter. Okay, so when I was weighing the media out, I realised that the Biohome Ultimate wasn't fitting in here very well, because this is quite a compact design, it's round, it's not really suited to a pellet-sized media about the size of your little finger, you know? So I went with the smaller version that we do called BioHome Plus. Now the internal structure of this is slightly different in that it is more consistent, it's actually a little bit more like the Eheim Substrat Pro. It's not as varied but it does allow you to get more media in here and it will still support the aerobic as well as the anaerobic Bacteria. That's it there. You can see that's packed in pretty well. Obviously, there's still a nation of space between all the bits of media for the water to get through. You know, I mean, I've seen online people saying, oh, I packed my filter with media and the flow cut down. It's just absolute bollocks because water just flies through there. The restriction of flow in your filter that causes the flow to slow down ultimately is your fine pad. When that gets clogged, your flow slows down. It's got nought at all to do with the media. And it doesn't matter whether you've got the fine pad here, here, or here, if it's anywhere in there when it gets clogged, your flow will slow down. And that lets you know that the filter needs cleaning out, or at least the pads need cleaning out. That is, again, a very popular media and it's perfect for smaller situations, especially oddly shaped canister filter trays. I know that's just round, it's not exactly an odd shape, but as far as fitting stick-shaped media in, it is an odd shape. You know, that's why I initially recommended the Balls. So if you're in a country where you can't get the Biohome Plus, I would recommend the Eheim Substrat Pro. Both will work. So I've managed to fit roughly 900 grams in each one of these trays and as you'll be able to hear there isn't much spare room pretty much packed out so that's about 1.8 kilograms or four pounds in total and that's pretty much packed out. As far as the design of this thing goes I just love how you can lift all the trays out like that that is very very convenient. Now, there was a time, not many decades ago, When the Italians were designing filters, and they looked beautiful, performed terribly, were really shoddily made, and they didn't last five minutes. They've really stepped the game up in the last 15 to 20 years, possibly even the last 10 years. I'm just trying to wrap my brains, trying to think of something beyond a decade ago. That I would have recommended from Italy, and there's not many of them. But it's totally changed now. I mean, sadly, Heido, I think, have gone to the wall. They made some really good filters. And CK seem to have stepped into that part of the market where Heido were. In that they're making things that look nice, but perform very well. I do like that. And I think currently, at the time of making this video, that is roughly 75 English pounds. I'm not sure what that is in dollars, probably $80, $85 or something. That's a pretty good deal for something that holds just less than 2 kilos of media. And with regard to the size of tank that it would be suitable for, it does say it would be suitable for a tank up to 200 litres. Which is entirely realistic because we've got the best part of two kilos of media in here. You'd normally allow one kilo of media per 100 litres for a normally stocked tank. If it was a heavily stocked tank you could halve that recommendation down to a 100 litre tank which would be a 26 US gallon tank. Again that's if you wanted to achieve a full cycle. Now if you weren't bothered about lower nitrates you could certainly get away operating one of these on a bigger tank or heavier stock. But the relatively low flow, compared to many of the competitors, may not suit a lot of the fish that you're keeping. Certainly for African cichlids, you know, reasonably quite big, robust fish, they like a bit of flow. I'm not sure this filter, just because of the flow, would be very good for them. Of course, you could rig this up and then you could put a wave maker in, that would give them the flow that they need. So, you know... This alone or in combination with other types of pumps or filters would work very well on a wide variety of tanks. So obviously I don't run these filters, I mean they're not mine in this series of videos, but I've heard nothing but good things about these filters and they also do an internal filter range called Shark as well. Haven't had an opportunity yet to look at one of those but they get good reviews. For the cost I would say go external, this obviously comes with everything you need, all the pipes, the attachments are going in and out of the tank, the spray bar, so I think for 75 quid you're getting quite a good deal with this. Hopefully that has satisfied your curiosity, if you've never seen one of these before. And if you have one, and you find it good, bad or indifferent, please put your findings in the comments section. That's what the comments section is there, it's for you guys to share ideas and share your experiences for the Good of other people's knowledge. Thanks for watching.