In this video, we customize the filter media that came in our Tunze Comline Filter. The filter came with basic media—filter floss and a basic sponge. That's good at polishing the water as far as getting particulates out. But most people are going to want to customize it with additional media. And Tunze leaves a lot of space in that filter that's not occupied.

First, we'll add Sera Crystal Clear. I really like this media. It has become one of my favorite mechanical filter medias. What comes in the Tunze Filter is a similar filter floss that catches debris, but it's designed to the thrown away when it becomes old. You can't reuse it. The Sera Crystal Clear is not a traditional filter floss. It's a floss-like substance, but it's actually a spun semi-plastic substance, and the big advantage of that is you can wash it out and reuse it again and again.

This filter floss is not cheap, but I'm often able to get this at least four or five uses out of it. With the Tunze filter floss and most other filter floss, you need to throw it away after one use. Switching to the Sera Crystal Clear will help us save some money when it comes to replacement media, and I frankly just kind of like the idea of not throwing things away all the time.

Along with replacing the filter floss, we'll add some chemical filtration media. There are a lot of different kinds of chemical filtration media out there to choose from. There are three categories. The first is activated carbon, which removes odors and discoloration from the water. The second category is phosphate remover. Phosphate is a problem because it fuels algae growth. A phosphate remover in the filter can maintain those phosphates at low levels and cut down on algae. Phosphate, if it gets high, can also be harmful to corals but usually. The third category is resin. Resins remove a wide variety of organics as well as heavy metals and other things.

What I've selected for our budget reef aquarium is Clear FX Pro from Blue Life. What I like about this is it includes all three types of the chemical filtration medias. It includes an activated carbon, a resin, and a phosphate remover in one bag that's very easy for us to add to the filter. And that's really nice in a tank this size where portioning out little bits of each of those medias could be a bit difficult. It's really nice to have one media that comes all together.

How often do you need to clean and replace this media? Blue Life recommends you replace it every four months. That's pretty long. I find you sometimes need to replace it more often if the tank is really dirty. If the tank is really dirty you may notice that it loses its effectiveness. You start to see the tints come back to your water that the carbon removes. You see the phosphate go up, if you need to remove a lot of it. But under normal maintenance use, four months is pretty reasonable.

As for the filter floss, I only replace this when it falls apart. You're going to be able to keep rinsing and reusing it. I usually get at least five or six uses before it's falling apart. As far as how often you should clean it though, really the more often the better. The more often you clean the media the more often you're going to get the gunk and waste that's trapped in it out of the tank. I plan on doing it once a week. Once a week I add the Prodibio we added in a previous video. I'm going to do my water change every week. I'm going to rinse out the media, and clean the skimmer cup. There's just a bunch of weekly chores that I do every week at the end of the week.

The first thing I do before working on the tank is to turn everything off. Turning off the filter will make everything less messy.

The filter sponge that came with the filter--we're going to reuse that. It's a good coarse filter and we can just keep ringing it out.

We rinse out the Blue Life FX Pro media before we put it in the filter. We rinse it in regular old tap water. The main reason we do this is sometimes the media can grind against itself and create some dust, and that'll make the water cloudy. But also it can get caught in the gills of fish sometimes, and we don't want that. It's known to be unhealthy for them.

I like to place the FX Pro chemical media at the very bottom of the filter as I won't need to replace it for a few months. We want to have at the top of the filter what we clean most often.

Next comes the Sera Filter Floss. Water passes through the top and the Filter Floss before the FX Pro. We want it in an easy-to-access place as I'll clean it once a week. On top goes the filter sponge. It will be easy to open up the filter and clean the sponge and filter floss as part of our weekly cleaning protocol.

If you like what you saw today keep watching for more. You can like and subscribe. We'll have more videos as we add more and more stuff to this as we customize the equipment a little bit further and get more corals into the tank. Thank you very much.