Pimp My Filter #7 - Aqua One Moray 700 Internal Filter

Hello there, welcome back to another edition of Pimp My Filter and in this one we're going to be taking a look at something that isn't quite as good as the filter in the last video. Now if you know me well you'll know that I like my action and horror films. What fella doesn't, you know? But this particular filter reminds me of Underworld, the very first Underworld film. When Victor, the head vampire, is just about to have a fight with Selene, who's our heroine of the piece, and we've got a hybrid of lycan and vampire lying in water, changing and changing back, Victor looks down at him and he calls him something that pretty much describes this filter. And that word in question is abomination. I've got to apologise to Aqua One and whoever invented this because this is an abomination. This is the Moria 700 and it's atrocious. It's just awful, absolutely awful. But we're going to see if we can do anything with it. I haven't done anything with this one yet so this isn't a pre-planned thing. This is going to be made up on the fly and inside it's just an absolute total mess. I must have spent about an hour just taking the bits apart and putting them back together and just wondering how on earth this thing was ever gonna work. Let me explain how as far as my investigations have led me to believe it actually works or is meant to work. Okay we'll start at the very top. Here we've got your outlet which can be adjusted to go out of a spray bar. Or some sort of nozzle which has just fallen off there which has got a venturi on so it can suck in a little bit of air and blow bubbles out or that can be shut off and it can come out in like a fan sort of a shape so that's pretty good nice to have two different options but there's also a third option because we've got our pump on the bottom of this thing which is a really strange place for a pump in an internal filter but that's that's okay that's all right you know doesn't Doesn't necessarily have to be on the top. We've got a little dial and this allows water to also come out of the bottom as well. So you can have it coming out the bottom and coming out the top but unfortunately the pump in here isn't really strong enough to deliver a decent flow out of both outlets so you've kind of got to have one or the other. That's only the beginning of the problems. Oh and you've also got a little skimmer thing here which is meant to float to the level of the water and just catch muck on here. Draw a little bit of air in I don't even know why I bothered mentioning that actually, because it's never going to work. I think what I'll do, I'll pull this apart, lay everything out so you can see what comes with it, and then I'll try my best to explain how it works. Okay, from top to bottom, that's where the water comes out. It can come out there in a fan or it can come out through our spray bar or nozzle. That's the top section which has got what I think are hard ceramic beads of media in there, which are pretty much useless. Next section down, we've got another cartridge here, but unfortunately the top's missing for that one. It would have had a top at some point, and that one's just filled with floss and wool and so on. That's not how it would come up from the manufacturer, that's just how Richard had it set up, trying to make this thing work. Next one down, we've got a lump of coarse foam and various bits of floss and foam and so on, and that's a similar tragic story in the bottom one. So that's all we've got in there, that is our pump, and if you notice in here, we've got a really strange sort of pipe, and that pipe actually runs all the way up through the centre of the filter, so as our pump is pumping, it's shooting up through this middle section, and that actually draws water in through here, through the sides, which is good, I like that system, but unfortunately, these are the only inlets we've got on these sections, one there, one there, one there, One there. All these other inlets are blocked off, so we've got a tiny little draw area. The hole going up the middle there, that's where our pipe goes up, the perforated one. That's it put together, empty. It doesn't draw any water in through the bottom of here, where the pump is. It only draws it in through these four sections. Each of the four sections has got four tiny little slits. I think you're beginning to see what the problem is here. As the water's shooting up the centre... It's drawn water in through the side of here, there's no control over whether it draws it all in here, here, here, whether it draws 25%, 25%, 25%, 25%, it should do, it should split it equally, but what if this gets blocked and that one gets blocked by a little bit of fish muck or a leaf or something? Then it's going to draw so much more in through here, this section is going to get totally left out and if this one and this one gets blocked then ultimately we could end up only operating on one of these sections. We need to put some sort of control in place to ensure that a large amount of the water goes through the foams first and then flows up through our biological media. Now, there really isn't any biological media in here, apart from this hard ceramic stuff, which isn't very good. So we are going to have to drill holes in this one, unfortunately. We'll try and keep that to a minimum, and we'll try and drill them in sensible places to ensure that a lot of the flow comes in here, and then actually flows up the inside through, hopefully, two media sections, and then back out. In an ideal world, I would like to have two sections for the foam, And two sections for media. Whether that's possible or not is anybody's guess but we'll give it a go. Okay that is the pump with the bottom section fixed. So in an ideal world we want a lot of the water to be drawn in here. Around here. Therefore we're just going to open up these slits. That's what we need to cut those slits out of. I really want to go through all of them. Opened this bottom section up for a lot of the water, but unfortunately my cutting disc is too big It's gonna make a real mess on there right. I've got a very fine drill bit in here Probably about one and a half mil maybe two mil I'm gonna see if I can put that through here and actually just drag it down to open up these slits Okay, that's all bottom section done now when we put that on there fix our tube in the bottom And the water's shooting up the centre of there. It should be able to draw quite a lot of water in around the outside of here. Right, now this old sponge might look a little bit tatty, but that's what came with it. It's still okay, so that can go in. But I'm going to take the one from the next compartment up and also put that in there. See, that fits in there pretty well. Now our water's coming in here. It's milling around here, and hopefully all the heavy muck is settling out in this bottom bit. That's the next section put on there. So we've got our coarse foams in here. Most of the water being dragged into here in the coarse foams. And you're probably thinking that I'm gonna open these openings up here in the next section, but I'm actually not. I don't want the water to be drawn in from the outside here. What I do want it to do is travel from this section into this section. So I'm just gonna drill some holes in here. To encourage upward movement of water through here. So we're just going to use a slightly bigger drill bit, maybe three mil or so. And we're going to drill a random set of holes around here to encourage that upward movement of water. We're going to keep a little bit off the side, just in case it interferes with any of the internal structure. And we'll drill maybe 15 to 20 holes in there. Okay, I'll clean that up and let you have a look. There you go, hopefully you can see those holes there. There's quite a few in there, so they should allow a good movement of water up through the trays from there. Obviously some water will still be drawn in through the sides, but not much. The majority of it will go in here, with our coarse foams, up into our medium foams. Put this little section in here. This is a very, very fiddly internal filter compared to a lot of them. But that will draw water in, fire it up the top. We'll just use one of these sections as a rough template and it doesn't have to be perfect. Basically as long as it fits in there pretty tight we're all good. I just need to cut a hole in the middle for our central pipe. Instead of trying to cut a perfectly round hole I'm just putting a cross in here. It's just like a bit of a pear shape that. That's because it needs to go in here so bumpy side down slot that in there. I think we'll put another medium foam in there and then we'll just have one fine pad in the top. There you go, happy days. That's two medium pads in there. Now we're just going to put quite a fluffy fine pad in here. Again this does not have to be perfect, as long as it's a little bit bigger than the space we're pushing it into it will be fine. Now as far as cutting a hole in the middle of here goes, you'll find it very hard to pierce through this with scissors and whatever you do, don't hold it and expect it to pierce because you'll slip and you'll just rip your fingers to bits. Fold it in half and just cut. Fold it in half the other way and a little cut. That gives us our cross in the middle to go over the central tube. So there we go, that's our fine pattern there. Now, that's all of our mechanical filtration done. If you wanted to you could squeeze this down and get a bit more in there, I think that's okay. So we're going to repeat the process for the next section, holes all around here and then that's going on there with some filter media. Now that goes on there, it enables water to flow up through the filter as it should and in there we're going to put one of these cartridges but I'm going to tip this old ceramic media out and I'm going to put some new sintered glass media in. Hey, there we go. They're literally just like hard ceramic marbles, absolutely hopeless. Oh yeah, I think you could probably load them into a shotgun cartridge, give somebody a fright with them. We're going to be using our trusty bio gravel. This is so handy for internal filters, it's unreal. Okay, that's taken approximately 250 to 300 grams to fill that properly. Sounds like somebody eating celery, doesn't it? Anyway, that's... That's really really packed that out but because it's made of tiny little balls the water can still get through that it can still flow around the media and because it is a very very porous sort of gravel actually made from sand the water can actually get inside the media as well. It's very porous it's made from the same stuff as bio home and if you don't know what bio home is just check my website out I'll put the link in the video description that has pretty much everything you need to know about it. That is now a really, really good biological cartridge. Well, it will be when it gets established with bacteria, which should only take two or three weeks for the aerobic bacteria to colonise this. It takes a lot longer for the anaerobic bacteria to colonise it, but it will eventually. It might take anywhere up to four to six months, but it will colonise it, and that will help with nitrates. It might not be enough, with the amount we can get in here, to make any sort of impact on the nitrates. in Richard's tank but it'll help. Okay we're building a lovely little tower here, we've got three sections in, we've got the fourth section again we're just going to drill holes in the bottom and in that one we've got another cartridge unfortunately the top of that cartridge is missing. Richard who sent me this lost it so I'm gonna have to do without a top so I can more or less fill it with the bio gravel and then I'll just put the coarse foam on the top Just to stop it falling out. Awesome, that's another one done. I'll fill this up to about an inch off the top with the bio gravel, so there'll probably be 175 to 200 grams in here. Therefore, if you were looking to replace the stuff that comes in these cartridges with the bio gravel for two of them, you'd probably be looking at about 500 grams of gravel. That would definitely cover you. I'll just show you underneath that cartridge. It doesn't have any holes in the bottom, but... When this sits in water can actually get all the way around so our water will flow through the bottom of the tray and it will be able to get all the way around here and it will get all the way through our media. Now because of the really awkward shape of this if you can't get any bio gravel then something like Eheim Not much, not much. Eheim Substrat Pro would be a good substitute because that is also a sintered glass media as well. Slightly more dense than the bio gravel, but it's still a good media. So that is another option. It does take something as small as that sort of media to pack in enough to be anywhere like effective in something like this. And like our last foams, this one doesn't have to be perfect. This is a coarse foam that's just basically going to go on the top, just to hold all that together, because we haven't got a top. That's in place of a cap, using coarse foam. Ordinarily, you would have a cap on, just like is on that one, so you wouldn't need a piece of coarse foam. That's just on so that when Richard takes this filter apart in his tank, Nothing's gonna fall out because the last thing you want is four or five hundred tiny little balls of media Tipping out all over the place because you're just okay So that goes in there goes on there the top goes on everything fits back together Now we've got a filter that should work should work very well Actually because we've got most of our water being drawn in here into coarse Sponges it then goes up through medium sponges fine pad Then it travels up through two cartridges that are filled with good biological media. and spat out back to the tank. There you go. Just by drilling a few holes in the right places, we've now got a filter that takes water in at the correct point, or the majority of water in at the correct point anyway. I don't want to start sticking tape over these bits. Because that's going to be really quite a passive flow now. The main flow is going to come in the bottom through all these little slits. And then it's going to travel up through our trays. That's the direction it wants to go. We will still get little bits of water coming in here. That doesn't really matter. We're not going to pull heavy solids in through here. Hopefully, by making most of the water come through here, we will pull heavy solids in. Or at least solids that could fit through here. There you go. I was a little bit dismissive of this, well, as you can tell, at the beginning of the video. I called it an abomination. It's not perfect, but I think you'll agree, it's set up to work quite a lot better than it was when it came. So, if you've enjoyed this video, hit the thumbs up, share it wherever you want, if you want me to take a look at and upgrade one of your filters, check out the video description and the pinned comment, it'll have useful links in there, but it'll also have my contact details, contact me however you want, I've put my email address and my phone number, I tend to answer the phone any time, the emails, as soon as I see it, I'll answer it, but if you want an instant answer, the telephone's the one to go for. I really don't want to do the same filter twice, so if you've got something different that hasn't been done already, by all means, get in touch and I'll do it. Thanks very much for watching, see you next time. It's Dave, man. Will you open up? I got the stuff with me. Who? Dave, man. Open up. Dave? Yeah, Dave. Dave's not here.