What should I do when I get my eheim?

My tank is still cycling, it will be 3 weeks this sunday. I have a walmart filter at this moment. I will be ordering an eheim 2217 tomorrow, and it probably won't get here until tuesday after next (if my last order is any indication of shipping time from big al's). I am planning on ripping the pads and carbon from the walmart filter and including them in the contents of whatever the eheim comes packed with. Does this sound like a good idea? I don't want to waste the good bacteria I have collected in the cheapo filter, but at the same time I don't want to screw up the overall effectiveness of the media of the eheim. I am ordering the eheim filter with media, and I'm not sure what it will come with. ANY info would be great.

It will come with little lava-like rocks for biological media and little ceramic tubes for mechanical media. It will also have two sponges one blue (course) and one white (fine).

Put the Eheim together then squeeze the drippings out of your walmart filter media into the lava-like rocks and the blue and white filters. Probably won't help bunches, but better than nothing. Replace the media back into the walmart filter.

If it were me I'd run BOTH filters for about a month. It will take about that long for the good buggies to fully populate the Ehiem.

I really don't have an answer for you on that. I use the stock stuff. (Other than if I'm bringing up a new one, using about half of the media and sponges from an old one.)

I'd just leave the old filter running as is, and add the eheim to the system. Run both for a few weeks - the bacteria will move itself to the eheim. Be aware that when you finally do remove the old filter, your chemistry will bounce for a few days - you'll be removing some of the active bio filter, and it'll take a bit for the bugs in the ehim to reproduce and stabilize at the new level.

That's something I've been wondering

A simple solution to that would be after a week or so, turn off the old filter for a few hours each day. . After a few days of that, keep increasing the number of hours the old filter is off until it's off completely.

This will begin to kill off the bacteria in the old filter, forcing the colony in the new filter to multiply to handle the load. If everything goes well, you wont have any mini-cycles.

That sounds like a good idea, I think I'll try it.

oo.

I LIKE how you think...

Intersting idea - if you go this route let us know how it works out...... You might just end up ping-ponging the 'majority' population from one filter to the other, but I can't think of a model that would predict the critical points for that to happen... (this is actually pretty close to what happens ion the north atlantic during the spring and summer 'plankon bloom' cycle. You get boom/bust cycles of different planktons as the nutrients and available light changes...)