I am a gadget guy… I like fancy cell phone and computers. So, when I saw the Fluval G series of filters… I liked them right away. That is, until I saw the price of them.
I got lucky and was able to get a returned, but never opened, G6 at a very good price.
I have had it running for about a month now. Set up was very simple, and no mess at all.
The bio media is separate from the rest of the media, which means you don’t have to disturb it for maintenance. Speaking of maintenance… it could not get any easier or quicker. I love it. Twist out the canister clean them up and replace. The mechanical portion is reusable and real easy to clean. The chemical portion allows you to easily use whatever media you want. Either buy the premade, or fill it with your own.
Now the gadget portion.
Temperature. It’s the temperature… nothing fancy there. It tells you the temp on the front and keeps a graph of the temp reading for the past month. Nice.
Flow. This is my favorite part of the filter. Tells you the percentage of flow you are getting compared to a fully clean mechanical filter. No guessing, reading drops… clean the mechanical filter portion. Perfect.
Conductivity. If you want to read up on it, go for it. What I come away with on this, to be ultra-simple…. This reading tells you how much “stuff” is in your water. Basically get your tank to a nice happy medium for your fish (by way of water tests) and look at that reading on the filter. As time goes on, you can watch the reading start to climb. When you do a water change, it drops back down to that happy medium level. So, if you keep an eye on it and you notice the conductivity is rising at a faster than normal rate… something isn’t right and start testing the water! Haven’t had this problem, thankfully. But, it’s another nice little visual gadget to see. You can also use it as a trigger on when to change the water if you want.
There is also a nice little screen that tells you when the last time to cleaned your bio, chemical and mechanical media. This has to be manually reset, but it’s a nice easy way to keep track.
So, that all being said. I still think that new… these are way too expensive. I don’t think I would buy one at a new store price. The gadgets on it that I really like are not needed to filter your tank. But, I like that stuff. The maintenance cartridges are EXCELLENT. For what I paid… I am EXTREMELY happy with the filter.
Each time I do maintenance on my XP2… I keep thinking… I wish this was a G3.
