Customers with more and other question are invited to contact us and if applicable these question will then be included here.
How does it work?
The underlying principle of this filter is the removal of the waste through flushing. The air-curtain pushes clean water out of the filter at one end which is replaced by dirty water entering the filter at the grill. The dirt is separated from the water by drastically slowing down the speed it travels through the filter substrate while it is in the filter body. The speed is controlled by the filter’s unique shape and inner structure. The slow-down causes the dirt to settle in the spaces between the marbles substrate and sink to the bottom of the filter (by simple gravity) while the clean water moves on to be pushed out again by the bubbles of the air- curtain. Once a week, the aquarium owner attaches the siphon to the filter's standpipe and siphons the collected debris out of the filter and hereby also out of the aquarium. This has never been done by any other filter before.
What is unique about the Aqua Genie and different from other aquarium filters.
The Aqua Genie filter is the first and only aquarium filter in the world able to remove the waste from the filter. All other aquarium filters on the market until now do not remove the waste. Instead they collect the waste in the filter substrate, then use naturally occurring bacteria to decompose this waste. This process is continuous until it reaches a limit after which the filter has to be cleaned and this is usually very time consuming, difficult and messy . The originality of the Aqua-Genie filter is it’s ability to remove waste before it has to be decomposed, taking away the need to clean the filter itself at a later stage.
How long does it take to clean this new aquarium filter?
The whole procedure from attaching the siphon till topping up the water takes a minute or two, the actual flush takes only 3-5 seconds and very little water for most debris to be removed.
Should I still use gravel in my tank or not?
The choice is yours and it does not make a difference for the filter. The purpose of any filter is to take out the debris from the water of the tank, so in a bare bottom or sandy bottom tank these debris will have no other place to go but inside the filter, later to be flushed out by you once a week. You can use coarse raw-sugar size sand (0.5-2.5mm), but avoid the commonly used gravel sold by most aquariums shops.
Gravel is a 100 year old practice left over from the use of the “under-gravel filter” which is the grand-daddy of all aquarium filters. Using gravel should have been abandoned by the aquarium Industry long time ago, because with gravel most of the debris will get stuck in the gravel instead of going into the filter. So for your and your fishes sake, please use coarse sand so that the debris can not get stuck in the sand and can only go into the filter, any filter, and with an Aqua Genie you can remove these debris from your aquarium in an instant.
In Nature, river beds and sea bottoms are always covered in sand or mud, never with gravel and once you use an Aqua Genie with a sandy bottom you will not have to use a gravel-vacuum ever again.
Some aquatic plants do not like their roots in sand, in this case please place them in small aerated pots.
Very important test if you are still using gravel: to see how much dirt is inside your gravel, scoop out one cup of gravel and pour this into a clear container or white bucket. Then add 2 cups of clean water, mix the lot by hand and put it trough a strainer. You will get the surprise of your life and won’t believe how much “gunk” comes out of that gravel. Now multiply this by the number of cups of gravel that are in your tank and you can understand why your fish may not be too happy about their living standards!!! Using sand and an Aqua Genie filter will solve this problem for ever
Can I change the gravel and the filter at the same time?
This is not a good idea because this could cancel out all biological filtration activity.
It is much better to change one at a time, probably the filter first and wait 5 weeks till the biological part has been activated before changing the gravel to sand. Also, please remember to keep all other rocks plants etc wet during the change over as these will have heaps of beneficial bacteria on their surfaces which are also part of the biological filter.
Most aquarium filters have 3 stages: mechanical, biological, and chemical !
Where does the Aqua Genie fit in?
Obviously any aquarium filter you buy is at least mechanical, the same goes with the Aqua Genie. What you may not know is that all filters also become “biological” filters after 5 weeks, because special bacteria start to live on the filter substrate and help to break down the waste. Chemical filters have extra elements such as activated charcoal or resins to help remove dissolved organic waste and other noxious chemicals produced by the bio-filter.
A chemical component for some Aqua Genie filters is planned in the future, so eventually it will function in all 3 stages plus the reverse flush stage. It can even be said that the reverse flush system the filter is based on, creates a completely new 4th stage of real waste removal.
What is an air curtain?
The air curtain inside the filter is simply a 17cm long horizontal 7mm poly-pipe with 0.5mm drilled holes at 8mm intervals where air is pumped through to make bubbles. It has the same effect as an elongated air-stone.
Can this filter be used for any kind of fish?
Yes, it works as well for goldfish, any kind of tropical fish big or small and also for marine or reef fish. Please remember the more fish you have in a tank the more often you should flush your filter.
Can this filter be used in any size aquarium?
Yes of course, unless the tanks is less than 35cm high, but the bigger the tank and the more fish you want to keep you may have to use more than one filter per tank.
Will I still need to do water changes?
This depends very much on the amount of fish you keep, the amount of food you give and how often you flush your filter. It would be wise to keep monitoring your water conditions (pH, nitrates, phosphates etc) for a while until you know how your new filter is affecting these water conditions in your particular situation
Where, when and by who were these filters invented?
The first prototype filter was the result of some “lateral thinking” by Phillip Dor, when he lived in Cairns in the nineties. He was an aquarium maintenance provider who was very frustrated by the difficulties he encountered in cleaning all those different aquarium filters used by his customers. However his first prototype filters had to be built into the bottom of new aquariums and could not be added to existing aquariums, this system was not commercially viable.
The idea that each filter is based on, from the first prototype to the final Aqua Genie, was that it must be better to remove the waste rather than let it decompose inside the filter.
AQUARIUM MAINTENANCE, IS THERE A BETTER WAY ?
Aquariums and home fishponds are living ecosystems with closed water recirculation. The number of fish they contain per volume of water is comparatively high to the situation in nature, but low compared to the situation in intensive fish farms. Whatever the situation and livestock density, all animals in these ecosystems produce excretions which if left unchecked may harm the inhabitants or even cause the habitat to become unliveable.
Hobbyists and aqua-culturists have been using many different methods of keeping their aquariums or fishponds clean and fit for healthy fish. Unfortunately most aquarium filter systems produced so far have completely missed the point and are in fact mini sewage-plants. These prevailing filter systems rely on naturally occurring bacteria to get rid of the fish excretions and other debris by actual DECOMPOSITION ! All filter systems currently on the market will have up to three functions:
Mechanical filter function:
All filters automatically have a mechanical filtration feature, the purpose of this is to capture all debris and store these inside the filter body. If they can’t even do this, they should not be called filters. The capture of debris is done with many different substrates such as: gravel, ceramic tubes, bio-balls, sponge, cotton-like wool, plastic foam, etc. Some hobbyists have their preferences, but my experiences show that all these substrates work more or less equally well when used according to their proper instructions.
Biological filter function:
Again all filters automatically become biological filters after the denitrifying bacteria have settled on the substrate contained in the filter. This happens in about 5 weeks after starting up a fish-tank, it is inevitable and most desirable because it will reduce toxic ammonia and nitrites into almost harmless nitrates. Adding these bacteria at start-up is advisable because ammonia appears immediately in the fish’s liquid excretions.
What most people do not realise is that the biological filter is not limited to the actual filter only, because these bacteria will settle on absolutely everything located inside the fish-tank, gravel, glass, rocks, plants, sand, ornaments, EVERYTHING. So the actual surface area of the filter substrate is not at all as important as has often been advocated, because the bacteria on the filter substrate are only a minor part of the total ‘biological filter’ of the whole aquarium or fishpond.
The best example of this is the Berlin method now predominantly recommended for live-reef tanks, which does not even have a filter as such, but relies solely and completely on the bacteria covering the ‘live rocks’ in these reef-tanks.
What is more important for any filter is the amount of water going passed the filter substrate and here again my experiences have shown that most existing filters have much less actual water flow than what is indicated in their specifications. The more water going through the filter the better it is, but when you see the diameter of the pump outlets and the hoses sold with these filters it is very obvious that they can not push as much water as they should. The best way to show this is simply increasing the size of the hose, because even without changing the pump, the water-flow can be doubled or sometimes even tripled with this simple and small change. The bigger the hose or pipe, the more water can be delivered.
Chemical filter function:
Chemical filtration is only an additional feature of some filters and usually composed of activated charcoal filter replacement parts or other filter replacement parts which are used for reducing phosphates with the power of aluminium oxide pellets, or ammonia reducing resins pellets. Activated charcoal is helpful against bad smells, yellowing water, and absorbing heavy metals. Fishy smells, high phosphates and yellowing water are all caused by the decomposition of the fish-poo and other debris within the filter, and this is actually a very clear indication of the poor efficiency of the present aquarium and fishpond filters.
So instead of trying to alleviate the problems caused by fish-poo, why have aquarium filters not tried to simply get rid of the fish-poo altogether? Why has this never been done before?
Aquarium maintenance & water changes:
The 3 filter functions described here are important parts of general aquarium maintenance and depending on how well each function works, the still unavoidable water changes will have to be done more or less frequently. The only aquariums which can avoid water changes are well-planted tanks, with a well-balanced livestock and minimal feeding, where the living plants consume the nitrates & phosphates produced by the aquarium. These conditions are usually only attainted by a minority of hobbyists, after several years of fish-keeping experience and perseverance.
For most hobbyists water changes will remain forever unavoidable because the nitrates produced & phosphates by all filters can only be taken out by changing a certain amount of water. If this is not done, these nitrates will slowly accumulate and become fertiliser for the green benthic algae which can settle on the glass and other ornaments inside the fish tank. These green algae are the common and very real nightmare of almost all hobbyists, and when it starts taking over, this is the sign that the filter, the gravel, the glass etc need a good clean. A chore all hobbyists absolutely dread and will try to delay for as long as possible, which usually back-fires badly the more it is delayed.
There has to be a better way !
In 1991 at the age of 51 and quitting my job in aquaculture I was now a “dinosaur” and forced to start my own business as an aquarium maintenance provider, cleaning hundreds of aquariums, some in commercial and public places, some in private homes, each with their own different filter but all very messy and labour intensive to clean, so I thought there had to be a better way !!!
Then I started designing my own filter systems, mainly for live indoor reef-keeping, and always trying somehow to evacuate the debris produced by the livestock.
At that time the Jaubert system was very much in vogue because it had a nitrate reducing capability. This system (however ingenious) was also very difficult and unreliable. I started to modify it by placing the power-head in a lower sump so that I could flush the substrate bed and purposely pump the debris out of the system. Actually this worked extremely well and delivered very good results, but it was very hard to install and had to be custom built for every aquarium, not a very feasible commercial proposal.
Now I had to modify my own designs and a bit like Dysson, I was getting caught up in my own endless nightmare, a continuous series of prototypes, each one better than the previous one, but still not good enough!
Then in 2005, I made a mistake and dropped something in the filter I was testing. First I thought this could not work, so I reset my filter and kept testing. But the mistake kept repeating itself, and finally I just kept testing without resetting the filter. To my astonishment the test came out better! Eureka, finally after so many years, the Aqua Genie system was born, the result of a small mistake.
At last I was able to capture the debris in a specific substrate in such a way that it could be evacuated very easily and very fast, without disturbing the fish or anything else in the tank. Best of all it could be done with a filter that could be retro-fitted to any fish-tank, without having to be built in.
However even after introducing my first small air-driven Aqua Genie model to the market, I now realise that most hobbyists are stuck in their own habits of aquarium filters and may be reluctant to change unless something similar to what they know comes up much better than what they already have.
So in a not too distant future I intend to produce an Aqua Genie version of every known filter system on the market today; corner filters, fish-bowl filters, hang-on back-pack filters for outside a tank, or hang-in like cartridge filters for inside a tank, in-hood filters and finally canister filters in 5 different sizes from micro to jumbo for up to large fish-ponds or even swimming pools.
The best news is that these filters will all be flushed-clean in a few seconds only, with very little water wastage, completely mess and stress free for everybody, livestock or hobbyist; the first aquarium filters in the world with four functions: mechanical, biological, chemical and ........flushable! From now on keeping fish will really never be easier or more enjoyable, at last.
The Aqua Genie system is not magic, but it surely works like magic !
PS: Against all odds, my assistant/daughter kept believing I could do it; without her unrelenting and infallible support I would have given up about a million years ago, that’s one of the reasons she is co-inventor.
A video clip showing the Aqua Genie can be seen on episode 29 of The New Inventors, plus a demonstration of the VA01 and the prototype canister and hang-on filters has been uploaded on YouTube: please CLICK HERE
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