One of the questions which I seem to have been getting quite a bit recently focuses on how to hide your aquarium filter from view. It seems that quite a few of our regular visitors are trying to create attractive, naturalistic aquarium setups and that having a plastic box buzzing away takes away from the overall effect.
If you are in the same camp of wanting to hide your aquarium filter then there are several possible steps you can consider but before we get onto these I’d like to issue a gentle warning.
The purpose of a filter is really to draw in dirty water, filter out chemical and physical debris and then eject the cleaned water back into the fish tank. By doing this your fish will stay much fitter and healthier and no established fish keeper would ever claim that filters are a luxury; filters really are an essential aquarium pet supplies if you really care about the health of your aquarium.
To a degree aquarium filters also have a second function in that the water being ejected from the filter causes ripples, bubbles or drops on the surface of your aquarium water, helping to aerate it so that your fish can breathe easily in their underwater world.
This means that whilst there are steps that can be taken to hide your aquarium filter it is just as important to consider that your filter is able to do it’s job successfully. The filter should be able to easily suck water in and spit it back out again. I have seen some aquariums over the years where a filter is tucked away behind dozens of plants but it is likely this filter isn’t doing as good a job as it could if it weren’t for the plants.
In other words, by all means hide the filter, but ensure it is able to do it’s job properly when you have finished making the changes to your fish tank.
So, with that said, how do you hide an aquarium filter?
Firstly of course you can consider placing your filter behind some plants or rocks so long as it will function properly in this way. However you can also take the next step and rather than using an internal power filter, you could consider using an external filter.
These external filters suck water out of the fish tank, into a separate filter compartment which is housed outside the aquarium, then the water is returned to the tank through another pipe.
In this way the main canister can be hidden away behind the fish tank or in a cupboard and the aquarist only has to worry about disguising a few clear plastic pipes rather than a large plastic box. In this way an external filter can be far more attractive to look at than an internal filter.
