Pimp My Filter #3 - Eheim 2213 / Classic 250 Canister Filter

Hello there, welcome back to another edition of Pimp My Filter. In this episode, we're going to be taking a look at something that I consider to be a bit of a heavy hitter. Not because it's particularly good, but because I get asked about this particular type of filter all the time. It's the Eheim 2213, also known as Classic 250. There's several very similar ones in the Classic range, but they all are kind of laid out the same. And when this arrived to me, it had the media in, it had foams in, it had been used, and it was absolutely dripping wet and stinking. So I've emptied a lot of the stuff out. Okay, you've got your pump head with your outlet. In here, you've got a kind of like an elongated bucket with holes in the bottom and holes in the top. That's what your water flows through, and that's what holds your foams and media. In the main canister part, you've got an inlet here. So water comes in the bottom, through all your media and back out to your tank. We'll forget about that for the time being. This is the bit we're going to be concentrating on because when this comes it's got a piece of thick coarse foam in the bottom, then nothing. Some fine pad in here and then a carbon pad on top of that. Now I've actually got a thick piece of carbon pad. So I'll just put that on top of there, just to demonstrate how it would normally come from the manufacturer. So we've got our thick pad in the bottom there, whatever media you want to put in. Then in the top section we've got our fine pad and carbon. That's pretty much in the right order because you'd always go mechanical, biological, chemical. But the placement of this fella is a problem, this fine pad. Really, we want all the mechanical filtration to be done in the bottom of here. But because this hasn't got any divisions in, if we put coarse pad, medium pad, fine pad. In there like that of course, medium fine. We've got it set up in exactly the right way because the water flows up from the bottom. But when we come to put our filter media in, our fine pad just gets crushed down and really compressed, which means that it doesn't catch much muck, or should I say it doesn't catch the muck effectively, it just traps it. On one face where it's very very compressed so that means within a few days it's probably going to block up in a normal tank. You want your fine pad to remain as fluffy as possible so that the water can flow through it and muck gets trapped in the whole structure of it. Therefore we're going to leave that on the bottom and into there we're actually going to put a divider. This divider is made from a plant pot that you would normally use for pond plants. Now these come in all different sizes, this one is 15cm diameter, it's too big to slot down inside of there, so we've used the bottom end of it because it tapers, and we've cut about 2 inches or 50mm down there, and the thinking behind this is that we can have all of our foams and our fine pad in here, media on top, and the media can't crush the fine pad, so all of our mechanical filtration is in the correct place, here's how it works. I've got a fine pad. Goes in there. Then we've got a medium density pad, which goes in on top of that, bumpy side down. And then we've got our original coarse pad. You can cut your own coarse pad if you wanted one with the dimples on. Again, that would go dimples down. So now we've got almost like a cartridge of foams. Coarse, medium, fine. And if you have a close look at that, you can see it's got little holes all the way around it. That makes a perfect receptacle. for our foams and fine pad and that just goes into there like that. Now you'll notice there's a little bit of space all the way around that divider that we've put in. So what we'll do there, we'll just cut a thin strip about inch and a half or 40 mil wide off our fine pad. It might help just to use a pair of scissors just to poke that in all the way around our divider. There you go, it doesn't have to be perfect as long as it stops water getting out the side. Of our perforated pot and straight up, it's all good. Basically now the water has to go through coarse, medium and then fine. And the fine can't be crushed, it's in there nice and fluffy in the container. Yeah that's a little bit neater now. And you might be thinking well I don't really want to fanny on and put that ring of fine pad around there. Well if you can find a decent container that you can cut holes in, or one ideally that already has holes in like that. That fits this thing perfectly. Go for it. Just use that. You wouldn't need to go around the side there. But this one, with it being tapered, it does leave that little gap all the way around. That's why that was done. Now when I got this filter, this is what was in it. It's a mixture of Eheim Mech and Eheim Substrat Pro. Now the Substrat Pro is a reasonably good sintered glass You know, it's certainly better than a lot of the ceramic media that's out there. That's not a bad media, but when it's mixed with this mech, I mean, the mech is literally a mechanical filtration. You put that in the very bottom, which I'm going to do in a minute, to catch the heavy muck, then it goes through your foams, and then it should go through your filter media. We can do better than that. Into there, we're going to be able to fit approximately 1.3 kilos, or 2 pound 14 ounces, of Biohome Ultimate. Now I'll put a picture up that I took with a microscope at 300 times magnification. I think it was 300 times, anyway. Anyway, this is a picture of the internal structure of this media. It has such a variety of different sized cavities and long tunnels, short tunnels, big holes in it, small holes in it, that it enables it to support aerobic and anaerobic bacteria for a full cycle better than pretty much anything. I've made loads of videos about this. I'm not going to go on more about it. It's not a bio-home pitch, but that's what we're using in here. Now ideally this would be washed before it went into here, but for demonstration purposes it doesn't have to be. There we go. Then our top goes on. In here, ordinarily, you would have your fine pad. We've got ours in the correct place, so we don't need a fine pad there. That enables us to put a carbon pad, because you can't really put media in there. It's not really suitable for media. You may as well go mechanical, biological, chemical. If you didn't want any chemical filtration, you could just put another coarse pad or something in there. So there you go. That's a cartridge of loveliness. That just goes back into the canister but first we're going to put a little bag of the Eheim mech. I picked out the mech from the Substrat Pro in this bag and we're going to reuse some of it in the bottom of here. In this particular model this mech is too big to fit back up the inlet pipe. In bigger models it may go up the inlet pipe so you may have to put some sort of screen on there because you don't want to block your inlet pipe up because that'll affect the flow. There you go. That mech is our first stage of mechanical filtration. That's gonna catch the heavy muck. It comes down the inlet pipe and hopefully hold it in there. It's gonna diffuse the flow as well. So a really heavy muck should collect in the very bottom of the filter. Then the water is going to go up in our coarse pad which will filter out the slightly less heavy muck. Then it's going to go through a medium pad to filter out the medium density muck. Then it's going to go through our fine pad which is not crushed to filter out the fine muck. Then it's going to go through our biological media which as long as plenty of this biological media is used for the situation it will convert ammonia to nitrite, nitrite to nitrate. Nitrate to soluble nitrogen, which will bubble off. That's a full cycle. That's what we're aiming for here. Then it's going to go through our carbon pad. You can put other things in here like softening resin and so on. I wouldn't advise using anything that is recharged with bleach because that will just murder the bacteria. Don't use that at all. If you want to use something to draw in pollutants, just put carbon in there or activated charcoal or something like that. That will do. That'll draw in unwanted fish treatments, heavy metals, all sorts of muck from your tank, tannins from your wood. That's all you need. I've seen people on YouTube advising their followers to use raw bleach to recharge porous media. That is basically going to kill off absolutely everything in the media now and also in the future. It just ruins your media. That's it. No more bacteria. Media in the bin. Hopeless. If you want to recharge porous media, i.e. ceramic or sintered glass media, well it shouldn't need doing for at least 6 to 10 years in a properly set up filter because it stays clean. But if you do need to do that, just use a hot oven. Spread it out, spread this out on a baking tray and cook it in a hot oven for 45 to 60 minutes. That'll burn off all the organic matter. And in effect it will recharge it. It'll give it a few more years of life. Never ever ever use bleach. I'm not going to go on anymore. So that goes in there. Our top goes on as such. Now we have a fully pimped classic 250 Eheim filter. When people are asking me about filters and what would be good for their tank, I never ever recommend the classic range because of the lack of any sort of dividers or trays. It makes it more difficult to set up. As you've seen, you can do it and you can get these quite cheaply but if you can get a filter that already has trays in it makes your job a hell of a lot easier, especially when you're cleaning it as well. I mean this one's pretty easy to clean, basically just take that top section off, empty your media out, give the bottom a tap, your cartridge of foam slides out and that's it for cleaning, you know, but if you've got trays it's a hell of a lot easier. This particular filter was sent to me by a lad called Richard, and he actually sent me two filters, there was this one, and one that I can only describe as an absolute travesty, which will be coming up in a future video. I haven't done anything to that other one yet, so it'll be interesting to see what can be done with that one, because it's absolutely awful. This one is okay, but there is quite a lot that can be done to it to get it working properly. Now if you're in the UK and you want me to take a look at and upgrade one of your filters, by all means get in touch. My contact details are in the video description and also in the pinned comment for this video. At the moment I'm only taking filters from the UK due to the shipping costs. This one in total now weighs probably three kilos. If I'm sending that beyond the UK, It gets expensive and I really don't want you to be paying me to upgrade a filter for you. I want to do it for free, apart from the shipping to get it to me, which in the UK isn't bad. in the UK for me to post that back to you isn't bad either. So I'm more than willing to fill this up with media, set it up properly, send it to you back, no problem at all. But please look through the previous episodes of this series because I don't want to upgrade the same filter twice. I'm looking for different filters. So please email me or phone me with the make and model of your filter. If it's one I haven't done before, All good. I'll take it, upgrade it, and you'll get it back pimped out. Thanks very much for watching, I'll see you next time, and if you think this video has been useful, by all means, give it the thumbs up, share it anywhere you want, and I shall see you next time.