Review on Innovative Marine Fish 🐠 Guard - Set of 2 by Kattie Steffens

Proper functioning of these fish covers can depend on how little living material is present. In my low-tech freshwater shrimp and snail tank, Fish Guards helped build up unsightly surface scum quickly. Please note that my installation is not standard. The Innovative Marine Lagoon 25 is filtered using a canister filter Eheim Professionel 4+ 250. The canister inlet is in the universal tank pan, as is the inlet of the (discarded) storage pump. Water must flow from the main tank through both overflows to be filtered. As almost everyone else has reported, Fish Guards drastically slow water return. So much so that, at full power, my canister pumped water from the sump into the aquarium faster than the backflows could. This caused the canister's air intake to run dry in the sump and suck in air. Slowing down to a speed closer to what Innovative Marine's own storage pump would have done resulted in limescale deposits on the surface. It looked like a layer of translucent white plastic with an amazing amount of debris never seen before. To remove this filth I had to remove one of the guards and turn the canister back to full power. By moving a keeper a little to the side, as suggested by Curtis McGee in his review, it is not enough to increase reflux to keep up with the amount of floating debris and organic matter produced by the relatively small number of fish that live in an aquarium. swamp, but they slow down filtration so much that the aquarium becomes a disgusting looking mess. The problematic fish shields inadvertently demonstrated what a great job Eheim does in keeping the water clear when he can grab it. The attached image shows the aquarium after one of the two guards has been removed. The photo is intended to show how little living matter there is in the aquarium. What you don't see are two Nerite snails and four Amano shrimp. There are no fish in the aquarium. I'm currently experimenting to see how much shrimp and snails I need to control algae growth.