PlanetCatfish.com

I splashed out on a new filter on Saturday - as my tank is filled with messy fish - several different plecos that are poo-machines, including my Panaque's that munch wood for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Not helped much by the Eartheaters (S. Jurupari) that stir up any mess made by the other fish.

So I decided, after some to-ing and fro-ing at the shop, to go for the full monty and get a Eheim 2028.

Installation was pretty straight-forward [1], I don't think it took more than an hour from unpacking the outer box until I got the system up and running. The only niggle was a kinked hose that appeared during the first night of operation, so the next morning I had to figure out why it wasn't flowing very much... After that, everything has been working fine.

Self-primer is a great feature. It's pretty simple really, it's just a big, spring-loaded, button that you press down and release to start the water flowing into the filter. Compared to the sucking on hoses and messing about that I used to have to do when I had an external filter some ten years ago, it's a doddle...

I'm still keeping the internal Juwel filter, so now the tank has 3 x 1000 l/h total flow, or around 7.5 turnover per hour.

Obviously, it's very much early days yet, but I can see a clear difference in the amount of gunk floating about in the tank.

[1] Although I personally would have preferred pictures next to the text rather than a collection of pictures on a fold-out leaf at the start. It's much easier to follow the text/illustrations if illustrations are next to the text that they are related to.

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Mats

Gidday Mats,

I know what you mean about Eheim instructions, I bought the 2217. Roughly the same specs as the 2028, albeit with the old suck-in-the-cheeks primer, and half the price tag. Mind you, I do prefer a mouthfull of fish water to one of petrol (but that's another story). I've worked a method to self prime the pump after filter cleans.

I did drool over the 2128 for a bit (the heated version of your 2028). The first time I switched on the 2217, the poor fish didn't know what hit them. They'd gotten used to a Fluval 2 in the old tank. Now they were doing clockwise loops around the tank regardless of which way they wanted to go. Took them a day or two to learn to wriggle that tail a bit faster.

I find the rocky / pipe filter medium a bit fiddly to clean. Do you keep yours in one of those mesh bags? Or just dump it in the trays? I don't have trays unfortunately.

I used the "ceramic macarooni", Ehfi-mech, in my old filter. Just dumped them in a bucket to clean them [then with tap-water], and then back into the filter, but I didn't have any other media except for some of that "polyester wool" filter to block particles going back into the tank. Modern filters have many more options...

In the 2028, I just dumped them in the basket [tray], and I hope that I don't have to clean in for some time - hopefully not this year, anyways.

2128 is nice, but I've got my heater hidden in the Juwel filter housing anyways, which sorts the "fish/heater conflict" problems, so aside from paying lots of extra money, I don't see what it's getting me. Of course, external temperature adjustment is nice - I'm sure my 20 month old son would appreciate twiddling it too... I'm not sure I would appreciate his efforts quite as much.

I did look at the 2217, but the price difference to the professional wasn't quite as huge as usual - the 2028 came with all the media as part of a "10 years of Eheim Professional celebration", which would have cost a fair bit of the difference.

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Mats

I felt like I was doing CPR(cardio pulmorary resusitation) on the filter the first time I started up my Eheim 2026. Powerful filter. Nice choice, Mats.
Amanda