I need to remove the bottom where the pump is. How do I do it? If you have the 20 or 40 Internal Filter, take a Phillips screwdriver and remove the screws from the bottom cover. If it is a 10i, the bottom simply pulls off. BREX How many gallons does the Whisper 2-10i curculates in an hour? BREX Does it produce oxygen for the fish to breath?  Yes, just by moving the water, all filters create oxygen in the water. They do not breathe like us, they utilize oxygen through osmosis. BREX Hi, can I order a replacement black filter cylinder and tubing for the Tetra 1-3 gal aquarium? On this site I located the exact kind but not this size. Do they still have the top/lid? The pump does not need to be replaced. The Whisper 1-3i is still very much available, but it only comes as a complete set, with pump. We do not sell direct, so you would need to visit a local pet or fish store to purchase it. Yes, they still have the lid. To find a store in your area, scroll down on any page on our site, and click the Buying Options tab, then Dealer Locator, and enter your zip code.

BREX My filter worked yesterday but I cleaned the tank and the water is not flowing out .Its glub-glubbing up and down in the filter Make sure the water level is to the spillway of the filter, and if it is, then unplug the unit, take it out, and pour out the water. Take the bottom half off to remove the impeller. If you have the 10 gallon size, once you pop the bottom off, you can pull the impeller out to clean it, and swab out the motor. If you have one of the larger models, you will need to remove the bottom cover with a Phillips screwdriver, then take the motor out, press in on the bottom of it, and pull towards the front of the motor at the same time. This removes the motor cover, and allows access to the tear drop shaped cover over the impeller. Once this is removed, pull the impeller out, clean it, and swab out the inside of the motor with a q tip. Please let us know if you need any other assistance. BREX Does the motor go in the water Yes, it does, indeed. BREX Does this filter suppose to give off fog like smoke in the tank?

I've already lost 2 glo fish. No, this filter has no way of giving off any type of fog or cloud. You are most likely experiencing either an ammonia spike and/or bacterial bloom. Test your water for ammonia and nitrite or have a fish store test it for you if you do not have a kit. Change 1/3 of the water, and replace it with clean water, AquaSafe Plus and SafeStart Plus. BREX I haven't had any major issues with my Tetra-Whisper 2-10 (Internal Power Filter) till today, as I am a Special Education Teacher. The suction area of the filter pulled a fish into over the weekend. Any idea how to rectify this? This will only occur when there is an issue within the tank such as poor water quality or disease. The fish will be stressed or dying, and no longer able to swim, so as it dies, it becomes attached to the filter. We would recommend testing the water for ammonia, nitrite, pH, nitrate, and alkalinity, do a partial water change with a gravel vacuum of 25%, and observe all of the remaining fish for odd behavior such as rubbing against objects, listlessness or lack of appetite.

Also look for white spots, torn or clamped fins, cloudy eyes, bloody spots. If you observe any of these, you may have a disease occurring in the tank.The trouble with traditional filters is that they can’t do their job without clogging.can you buy georgia aquarium tickets door William & Mary ichthyologist Laurie Sanderson has a patent pending on a new type of filter that is designed to be clogless, or at least clog-resistant. cheap aquariums near meThe design is based on the fluid dynamics of filter-feeding fish. a large aquarium has portholes of thin transparent plasticShe is the author, along with several William & Mary undergraduates, of a paper presenting the novel fish filtration mechanisms in Nature Communications.custom fish tanks toledo ohio

If you think about the filters that we use for making coffee or in furnaces, then Sanderson’s design hardly seems like a filter at all. Traditional filters work by screening the particulates out of the stream, and such filters need to be changed or cleaned. custom fish tank decorationsBy comparison, Sanderson’s crossflow filtration design works on the principle of concentrating the particulates. corner fish tank ebay ukIt directs and recirculates fluid flow through a structure that looks familiar to anyone who has peered down a fish’s gullet. She calls the process cross-step filtration. “I’m not suggesting we redesign our cars,” Sanderson said. “But, just by way of example: What if you could design an oil filter that instead of clogging and needing to be changed, it would send the stream of concentrated particles in one direction and the clean oil in another?”

She explained that while the process would not be practical in automotive oil filtration, crossflow filtration has a number of industrial applications and a cross-step process could be an improvement. “There are many cases in industry in which we need to do something quite similar to what these filter-feeding fish are doing,” Sanderson said. “For example, in filtration of dairy products or fruit juices, we separate the hard parts — the fruit pulp, some of the congealed milk products — from the liquid. “But here’s the situation today in industry,” she continued. “There is a filter, and that filter always clogs.” Sanderson, a professor in William & Mary’s Department of Biology, says she spent 30 years thinking about fish mouths, trying to decipher the secrets of the clog-free fluid engineering going on inside what she calls the “black box” of filter-feeding fish. Many fish are filter feeders, she said, ranging from the whale shark — the largest fish swimming — down to menhaden, an important commercial species in Chesapeake Bay.

Even goldfish are filter feeders. She described goldfish as facultative filter feeders, fish that pump water into the mouth. By comparison, paddlefish and basking sharks are ram filter feeders, swimming through water with mouth agape. For Sanderson and her lab, the intake strategy is less important than what happens inside that black box, once the nutrient-laden fluid gets inside the fish mouth. “When you look at a live fish, the water and the particles come into this black box, and then only water exits from the sides of the head,” she said. “So — water and particles go in the mouth. Then, something mysterious happens.” Sanderson has used a number of scientific tools to probe the mystery of the filter-feeding black box. “In the 1990s, I wondered what would happen if we could actually see into that black box, while the fish was feeding,” she said. “So we developed a technique to use a miniature fiber optic endoscope.” She used an ear, nose and throat endoscope, less than a millimeter in diameter.

“What we saw right away was that fish mouths weren’t filtering the way we thought they were,” Sanderson said. The understanding at the time, which persists in many texts today, was that the black box structure acted as a dead-end sieve like a spaghetti strainer or a coffee filter. “That’s not what we saw with the endoscope,” she said. “We saw fluid and particles moving parallel to the filter. By the early 2000s, we had combined the endoscopy with computational fluid dynamics and realized that a diversity of fish species were using crossflow filtration. However, this just created another puzzle, because the fish crossflow filter never clogs, even though industrial crossflow filters always clog." Sanderson’s co-authors on the Nature Communications paper, Erin Roberts ’16, Jill Lineburg ’16 and Hannah Brooks ’16, are W&M biology majors who joined the lab after the endoscopy and computational fluid dynamics work was done. Roberts was the first of the three student co-authors to join the lab, starting her sophomore year.

She helped Sanderson set up a flow tank in the basement of Millington for the next phase of the inquiry. The lab members studied preserved paddlefish in the flow tank — actual fish that left the taxidermist’s bench with mouths wide open, in feeding position. The flow tank tests on preserved paddlefish complemented the design and 3-D printing of models of fish oral cavities; Roberts pointed out that the activities involved a significant amount of fluid dynamics and physics. Sanderson and the lab were trying to reverse-engineer the efficient filtering-funneling action used by fish. The flow tank revealed more of how fluids behave as they go through the black box. Roberts explained that the tank allows the researchers to adjust the speed of the current while videocameras capture the movement of particles or dye through the preserved paddlefish or the 3-D models. Brine shrimp eggs are introduced to serve as particles. Sanderson explained that the paddlefish and basking shark oral cavity consists of a set of bony structures known as branchial arches and the slots between them.

The arches descend in size in a precise ratio as you go toward the back of the fish. Sanderson said a large portion of the black box’s function consists in how the arch/slot arrangements form “backward-facing steps,” creating a set of vortices, or recirculation regions, behind each step. “The fish use these backward-facing steps and the resulting recirculation regions to manipulate and concentrate the particles,” she explained. The vortices also act as a “hydrodynamic tongue,” keeping the concentrated particles moving through the system — without clogging. “This is something that potentially can be of use to industry,” Sanderson said. “Other filters use various kinds of knobs, baffles, ridges and corrugations. Engineers have been very clever in designing crossflow and other types of filters.” Jason McDevitt, William & Mary’s director of technology transfer, notes that Sanderson’s design is different enough for it to get patent pending. Sanderson says that one advantage of her concept is that it could be used to design filters that would separate out particles in a controlled fashion, directing the particles in any desired direction.

“In theory, you could even separate different sizes out of the particle stream,” she said, “so it could send big particles in one direction and small particles in another direction." Sanderson’s lab continues to work on other aspects of the problem of the black box. Brooks is studying paddlefish feeding in greater detail, while Lineburg is continuing studies with goldfish, training them to eat various types of particles. “We’re using videotapes to try to gain insight into the mechanisms in their oral cavity that allow them to process these particles,” Lineburg explained. Sanderson says her cross-step process has the potential to be helpful across a number of applications and scales, from teeny filters of cell-sized particles to huge industrial pipes. “These recirculation regions, behind any obstacle — but particularly a backward-facing step — form across basically any mechanical scale,” she said, including miniature blood pumps and even stent wires in arteries and other vessels."