Marineland media container

[SeeTheCityLights]

What media should I put in my Marineland Emperor 400 containers?
I have a 100 gallon planted tank. I also have an Aqua-Tech 30-60 HOB filter running in it, which came from my 29g so it is already cycled. I plan on putting discus in it, but right now I have a gourami, a pleco, 2 black skirt tetras, and a crawdad in it... I transferred them over to it from my 29g tank to help cycle it. The pleco will for sure stay in the 100g because he's a little too big for my 29g. The gourami will probably go back to my 29g as well. Can the craw dad stay in the 100g with discus or is that a big no-no? The black skirts may stay in the 100, as long as they don't do any harm to the future discus's.
If it makes any difference, I have 4 bags of Eco-Complete and 1 bag of Petco brand black aquarium sand as the substrate.

[scottishbloke]

When I used an Emperor 400 on my 90g, I carefully slit open 4 filter pads along the top blue mesh and emptied out the carbon (it's useless after a month anyway), then filled them all with Eheim Substrat Pro, and used all 4 at once in the filter. The bio-filtration I got was immensely improved. The plastic media container inserts you get with a 400 don't hold much media, so I didn't bother with them. If you do what I did, be VERY careful not to pack too much media into the filter pads and take turns cleaning them (only 2 at any one time) to avoid destroying your bio, ensure good flow rate, and prevent the pads from getting too clogged- HOBs can overflow onto your floor if the water flow is impeded too much! You can also just put media in small food safe mesh bags and place them inside the filter box instead. ALL THESE THINGS ARE DONE AT YOUR OWN RISK. In the end however, I stopped using the 400 after a few months- it was waaay too noisy regardless of what I did to try and quieten it. Now I use an Eheim Classic 2260 canister, a huge but virtually silent beast that holds 18 liters (almost 5 gallons) of media- and my filtration concerns are permanently over.

I'm not sure what others will say, but the big claws on those crawdaddies can do some real damage to fish if given the opportunity. I once briefly kept some Macrobrachium lanchesteri with discus; they resemble giant ghost shrimp and only have little claws, but would still catch and rip up sleeping cardinals at night. Your particular crawdaddy might be an ok guy with other fish, but all the same I wouldn't recommend it for the rather expensive discus you may get. This is just my opinion only.

If you use black substrate, many pigeon-based discus strains will darken and pepper a lot- either cover up such a substrate with dense carpet plants or put a layer of white sand on top, or else don't use it at all.

Just my 2 cents, everyone is free to disagree as always...

Colin

[Eddie]

I used porous rings or eheim substrate pro.