BioWheel Filter

[Abbeys_Mom]

I was always under the impression that a healthy fish would not get sucked to the filter intake. This has been proven wrong by my sparkling gouramis. I have a penguin biowheel filter that I used to have on my 55g tank. It is filter overkill on a 10g, but I don't see over filtration as a bad thing. Anyway, I was watching the tank and one of my sparkling gouramis swam too close to the filter and was actually sucked against it. I immediately lifted the intake hose and broke the suction. The fish is ok and doesn't seem affected, but I knew I had to fix the filter. The kind I have doesn't have adjustable flow, so I had to figure out a way to lessen the flow. The solution I came up with was to lift the intake hose. The farther from the impeller, the slower the flow of water. It's a little louder then it used to be, but saves me from buying a smaller filter. If anyone here has small fish and a big filter, I recommend doing the same.

[Fishguy2727]

That's very odd. How small was the sparkling gourami? You could put a large pre-filter sponge on the end of the intake. At work we lost the intake strainer to the Fluval on the 90 gallon so we put the pre-filter to a powerhead on the end and it works great, better than the old crappy Fluval intake strainer. I would do that over the lifted tube because it is possible that the lifted tube is working the pump harder, which means a burned out pump that much sooner.

[cocoa_pleco]

thats weird whith the gourami. I had the same prob with overkill in my 10g with a biowheel, and I just slipped over a sponge or i planted alot of plants by the intake.

[Abbeys_Mom]

The Gourami was a female about 1/2 an inch in length. I watched it happened, the current pulled her to the intake and held her there. All the Sparkling gouramis are healthy, I figured they would be able to swim away.

[Sasquatch]

It happens. While it's not a bad thing to have too much filtration, too strong a filter can suck in small fish.

Reptile's idea is a good one and one I've used often enough when I was culturing fatheads. I currently have the same thing in place on my 10g. We have an aquaclear 20, but since we added some platy fry (and will likely get more!) we took one of the sponge inserts, cut into it and sliped it onto the intake.

The gourami should be fine. It can cause a problem though if they get stuck there for a while. It'll cause hemorages which leads to infections and stress the fish out big time.

Just about anything that will keep the fish away from the intake will work. Even a makeshift bag of mosquito screen will work well.