The Ultimate 'Invisible' DIY Aquarium Filter? - Hidden DIY Aquarium Filter Build

Hello there, welcome back. I'm not normally one to put clickbaity titles on my videos. This one is an exception because I think this is the best aquarium filter in the world. Now this is the Oshiiki OR-7 resin ornament from a company called Unipac. They're not very widely available unfortunately but I'll put a link to one in the video description. The reason I've got my hand over here is because I'm hiding what's going on here. There's a whole heap of stuff going on inside of here. And if you want to find out how I'm going to make this into the world's best aquarium filter, please watch on. Here's our rock. And in front of me here is everything that we're going to be trying to fit into here. Now some of the things here you will be familiar with, but I can guarantee that a lot of people watching this won't be familiar with at least two, possibly three of the things that we're going to be making our filter with. Okay, so the first thing is this tiny little pump. This is a very special pump. Might not look it, but this can actually shift 450 liters per hour, which is approximately 118 US gallons. It only consumes six watts of power. And it has an air intake. This little pump draws air in at the point where it draws water in. Now that's totally different from pumps that you might be familiar with because ordinarily, aquarium pumps will pump water out and it'll be like a Venturi device. This one's different because it sucks it in right next to the impeller where the water is being drawn in. Therefore it allows the air to be really shredded in and mixed in with the water. And by twisting this on the end of here you can adjust how much air is drawn in and that results in different size bubbles so you can have really tiny little bubbles that go all over the tank and you're hopefully going to see that demonstrated later on in a tank. Now if you're just using this in the tank it'll deliver the oxygenating effect down to 45 centimeters or 18 inches. If you're in a different country and you don't want to order from the UK and use a plug-in converter to run this particular pump, you might find something similar from suppliers of hydroponics gear. For whatever reason, these aren't used or marketed for aquariums, but the way they draw the air in, mix it with the water, they're perfect for aquariums. And I'll put a link in to a previous video I did where I made a little tube filter for breeding tanks where I used that pump, so you'll get a lot more details about it there. That pump is going to have that on the end of it. This is a spin stream and I only became aware of these when I was actually looking for something else. And if you attach this to the outflow of your pump it allows the flow not just to head in one direction but to actually rotate like this. The faster the water comes out the faster it'll rotate so you don't get any dead zones. It's almost, it's a little bit like a wave maker, It's more fluid... than a random flow generator which is what I was originally looking for until I saw the price. Now just imagine that my breath is water going out of here and the pump blowing out. There you go. It goes round. It's quite noisy because it's not in the water yet. The reason I went for this over the random flow generator is because the random flow generator was like 25 quid. That's 25 English pounds for something that's just 3D printed and about that big which seemed like a hell of a lot of money. This was, I think, £7.50 on Amazon, but the delivery was from Denmark, added about another £5 on, so it was half the price. And according to the packaging, this one is suitable for between 200 and 2,000 litres per hour. That is 52 gallons per hour to 600 gallons per hour. Bear in mind that our little pump that's powering this thing is only 450 litres an hour, or 118 gallons an hour. This seems like the obvious choice. The videos that I saw about the random flow generator seem to have quite big pumps. Instead of the flow being quite smooth, which is hopefully what I'm going to get from this, the random flow generators seem to always use a very powerful pump, like maybe it's 290 gallons per hour, and it seems to chop and change from one direction quite quickly, which would be great in marine for corals and so on. It'll replicate waves crashing Crashing into little rock pools, but I want something different. That's why I went for that. We've also got eight quite strong silicon suckers which is going to be used to fix this to the back of our tank. We've got 2.5 kilograms of biogravel in mesh bags, 2.5 kilograms is a hell of a lot of filtration. That will hopefully give us a full cycle, that's the reduction in ammonia and nitrite and nitrate. Full nitrogen cycle, in an aquarium of approximately 250 litres, or a heavily stocked aquarium of about 125 litres. Next we've got some of the Eheim Mech. I'm not sure exactly how much of that we're going to use. That's kind of just going to be poured in to fill gaps, but that'll give minimal biological action. But it'll also help to trap heavy dirt as well, and support any higher organisms that happen to be living in our filter. And last but not least we've got some fine pad and a coarse foam which has been cut to size previously. So let's get the drill out and get a start. Right, the very first stage is to drill some holes at various points around the outside of this lip and then attach our suckers. That'll allow this to be stuck to the side of the tank and because it'll be stuck to the side of the tank, All of the base will be clear for the fish. Really, when you're sizing the drill bit, it just wants to be smaller than the nipple on the back of this sucker. So when you push it through the hole, it stays in there very tightly. So that's what we're going to go for. Not quite sure what size that is. The size you use will depend on the size of the suckers. I've actually just marked it out where there's plenty of space underneath the lip. You see underneath there, there's a good gap underneath there, so that's where I'm putting the suckers, where there's a decent space underneath the lip, and that'll allow me to get the sucker in and also the foam tucked underneath. Don't want to put it anywhere where you've only got, you know, a few millimetres, because you'll not be able to get the sucker in, and you'll not be able to get the foam in underneath it either. Hopefully you can see those black marks there, that's where we're going to drill the holes. With a cordless drill, you can use a Dremel, you can use any sort of drill. Basically, as long as you put holes in there, it's all good. It's not going to go anywhere. If you're worried about drilling holes around here, because this is quite brittle, and if you slip, you could just smash straight through the front of here, you can just drill a couple of holes and put hooks on the back of your tank and actually just hang it over the back. So this would be inside your tank. Drill a couple of holes here, hooks around the side of the aquarium. And that would support it no problem at all. You don't need the suckers. I'm using the suckers because it'll allow me to have it anywhere on the back wall. But it's not essential. The next thing is we need to find a good position for this little pump. Right, that's what we're kind of aiming for. But obviously that'll be about an inch lower. So when that's on the back, you really shouldn't see the outlet too much. What size is it? About an inch diameter. Not too good to see, but... That's what we're going to be drilling out. It's a hole approximately 25 millimeters or an inch in diameter. Because I don't want to just go bang straight through it with a one inch drill bit, I'm actually going to drill a lot of little holes and then just gradually cut it out. To do that I'm going to be using a Dremel with a small drill bit which is approximately Three mil, maybe it's an eighth of an inch. Awesome! Right, now we just need one of the little rubber attachments that comes with this spin stream to enable us to attach this thing to our pump, because presently it doesn't fit. Right, there's our pump, there's our spin stream, small end goes on the pump. I've already cut this to size. This was a little bit longer here and a little bit longer there. I don't want a really long length, I want it to be as small as possible. That's a lovely tight fit on there. No wasted rubber. Slots straight onto there. Now all we do is feed that spin stream to there, okay, go inside and attach our pump. Right, that seems to be wedged in there pretty well. That's good, good. Okay, now that we know that this thing fits all fine and groovy, we'll take it out and we're going to drill lots of little holes in all the nooks and crannies here. There's already some holes drilled. That's how it came from Unipack, and that's because when you put it in your tank, you don't just want a huge bubble of air underneath here, you know? That's to let all the air out, no matter where you have it in your tank. And these holes that we're going to drill don't need to be huge. We're just going to use the same small drill bit again, and we're just going to perforate this thing. The majority of the water will be drawn in through the back. But I want it to be drawn in all around here as well. That'll ensure that the water still flows through here and into every part of the filter, even if the back foam is absolutely neglected and clogged. Hopefully this will enable you to see all the holes in here. You see how that's coming out on the viewfinder, but hopefully you can see at least some of the holes that I've drilled in here. You know, every time you see a flash of light, that'll be a hole. This whole thing is going to be a living, breathing filter. Okay, so... Back in with our pump and spin stream. That can be fixed now. If you're copying this, before you put the pump in, just make sure that the inlet is open all the way so you get the maximum flow. You don't want to put all this together and find out that you've got it shut right down. Wouldn't be good. Okay, so in where the pump is, we're just gonna fill around the pump with our Eheim mech. And now we're gonna start putting all of our bio-gravel in. It's already bagged up. Not sure exactly how much is in each bag, but each bag is pretty much full. I'm gonna start squeezing that in anywhere we can. Hey, that balls-up hole that I made fits our air line through beautifully. There's an added bonus. And we just want to make sure that our filter media is probably about an inch, at least, below the height of this lip. But I feel like somebody in the Mexican cartel packaging something for export. But we've got it all in there, all two and a half kilos of media. Now if you want to get really picky and obsessed about packing this out with as much stuff as possible we can tip some more of the mech all the way around just to fill in all the little gaps and just to level everything up nicely for our foams and into there we're now going to put a fine pad this one's actually very thick possibly a little bit too thick ideally you want one about 25 mil or an inch thick that's probably near an inch and a half to inch and three quarters. So this one isn't ideal and on top of that we're going to put a reasonably coarse foam which has been pre-cut. All I did I just had a big piece of foam, I laid the rock on top, marked it out, cut it out, it's the right size. Now we're going to press this down, tuck it underneath the lip and hopefully everything should stay in place. Okay that is what our aquarium rock filter looks like. I would never have thought that all of that stuff we had laid out at the start was going to fit in there, but it has. No problem. So this is going to go into my new aquarium, which I shall now fill up with water. I'll turn it on and I'll let you see what it looks like in operation. Now in the interests of total transparency, that cost round about 100 English pounds to put together maybe. Which might sound like a hell of a lot for what is essentially a DIY filter but so many people have these resin ornaments either on the base of the tank or on the backs of the tanks and they're just hollow. There's just wasted space behind them. This makes pretty good use of that space and although it does cost quite a lot compared to a lot of the DIY filters that you see on YouTube I think you'll agree it looks a million times better. There's quite a lot of different components to this, so I will put links wherever I can in the video description. It's actually been in a few weeks now because I wanted to give that rotating head a decent chance to either stop, keep going, or be intermittent. And as it happens, it's never stopped rotating. And let's just take a moment just to see how quiet this thing is. Not much sound there. I'll put a light on the outlet so you can see what's happening there. Now I've got the bubbles set to be very, very small. So you can see that they're absolutely all over the place, but that outlet is turning beautifully. Right, that's looking at it from a little bit further away. You can see just how many bubbles are in that water. You know, it's absolutely tiny. The air's being shredded by the pump and spat out through the rotating outlet. Obviously you can adjust the bubbles. You can turn them totally off or you can have them much bigger. I'll just mess about with the lighting a little bit because we do have a colour changing LED light above here. You want a kind of like a black water effect. There you go, it just kind of replicates peaty water. I'll just take that off, put that light off. Obviously you can't see all the bubbles now, but you know, just imagine soft water fish and something like that. Or even something like that. Or you might want like a moonlight effect. A whole range of colour effects and if you wanted to recreate hell you could even go with dark red. Have a disco. That's back to white and to me that looks a little bit sterile. Obviously there's no plants or anything in so it will look sterile just being a rock with a black background but if we just change it back to the very light yellow light that gives the water kind of an aged effect and that's what you would expect to see in low pH tanks. I like that one. Take that light out the way and I'll show you how this is fixed to the back. Obviously we've got our suckers on. But after a few days, what I was finding was the bottom of this was actually coming away from the glass. So I got some little pieces of fencing wire, bent them into an S shape, and I've put one, two, three on there, and our rock feature just hangs on the back, and it's never budged. Just those simple three pieces of wire have just fixed it on there, and it just holds everything steady, you know. I suppose with an open-top tank, Really, you could drill holes in here and put plants directly into the top of here and have them growing out the top. It would look pretty awesome. There you go. That's looking under it. Obviously, if that was planted up, you could have plants spilling out into the water, plants coming out the top, and their roots would either be in the water or they would be in the filter, in the filter media, all aiding with the filtration in the tank. So there you have it. That, in my eyes, is an awesome filter. And I'm not just saying that because I made it. I've made some crap filters over the years. That one is not one of the crap ones. But I'd like you to let me know what you think of it. Obviously, the rock along the back looks pretty nice. But I'm going to get two smaller rock ornaments. One's going to go in the viewfinder. One's going to go there on the back wall. The other one is going to go on that side. And then I'm going to get a smaller rock fixed to the bottom of the tank to create like a total rockscape. with black sand or black micro gravel in here to make a beautiful tank. It will be nice and you never know I may even put fish in it. I'd like to think there'd be a lot of people be interested in making something like that so if you've liked this video please give it the thumbs up and share it wherever you want on forums, Facebook groups, that sort of thing and then hopefully there'll be a lot of people make similar filters to that you know just kind of just based on that idea it doesn't It doesn't have to be in a particular rock. That's just an idea that I've thrown out there. It's quite easy to do with minimal tools and minimal gear. But in there, we've got well over two kilos of filter media just working away quite passively, but all acting to reduce ammonia, nitrite and nitrate in a tank. And I often hear so many people say, oh, I didn't like to see the filter in the tank. I want to go external, but I haven't got room for external. What do I do? Well that is, in my eyes, a good option. Takes a little bit of work to put it together, but it is quite easy and straightforward. Hopefully this video will have helped to show you how to do it. If it has, by all means let me know. Thanks for watching, see you next time.