I have alot of filtration on my tanks and mainly run Emperor and Penguin filters. For those of you familiar with these filters, can you give me some ideas on reducing the amount of water movement. The area where the water comes out of the filter and back into the tank is stationary, meaning they can not be turned in a different direction, say to face the tank wall or off to the side. I have Emperor 280's and 400's and I have Penguin 350's running. I do have a Rena XP 3 running on one of my tanks along with two Emperor 400's and a bubble wall, so this is one tank I would love to cut movement down.

I feel like my fish would like a bit less water movement, so any thoughts and advise would be welcome.

I forgot to mention also that I have two tanks running AquaClear 110's and 70's!

I have some tall potted up sword plants in one of my tanks that I put in the way of the strongest water return, and that seems to tame it enough for my purposes, since I have two young pearlscales who have trouble when the current gets too strong.

I've also seen photos of tanks where people have rigged up a piece sponge over the bottom lip of the return for that purpose, although my attempts were not successful.

This is what I do with one of my filters and I feel like it's helped a lot. The water breaks up as it hits the sponge and the sponge does wonders as a biological platform since it has a constant flow of water through it.

I have taken pieces of thicker plastic - overhead projector sheets mostly, and folded them under the filter so that the water spilled out of the filter and ran across the sheet to be dispursed.

Currently I have two running where I have take the lid from the Emperor or Penquin and turned it upside down so that the curved piece hangs under the outflow - taking the currents off....


Here is a picture of one hanging under a box of a broken AquaClear filter.... The filter lip holds ithe lid in place and the currents are dispersed nicely for the fry (or small fish, etc).

Gee, Thanks everyone, those are some great ideas. I have sponges and some extra covers from Emperor 400's, I had bought an Emperor 400 and it was missing the cover, so I just called them to send me one and I got one of them, three days in a row, so I have some of those. I'm going to experiment to see what works the best. Thanks again!