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Summary: Make sure to have to have a charcoal bin along with the bio-beads bins for your turtle. Learn how to choose filtration bins for your turtle from an industry professional in this free pet care video.
Cordell Jacques has worked in the pet industry for more than 10 years. He is also a reptile hobbyist in one form or another. Jacques keeps more than 20 various reptiles, frogs, fish...read more
"OK, so in order of the bins we have here. We have a bin of bio beads, like I said they build up beneficial bacteria to help to eat fish waste or turtle waste, or leftover food for you. We've got two bins of the bio beads. You can never have too much biological filtration, OK. It's very important, it helps a lot. The last bin that you have in here is a little bag of charcoal. And what that does is helps suck out various chemical compounds, and things like that in the water. Now, the charcoal, if you aren't replacing this charcoal on a month to bimonthly basis, don't put it in here. Leave it out. Because what happens is after this builds up enough chemicals that it sucks up, it starts to leech them back into the water, and it can actually hurt you in the long run if you're not changing it regularly. So, if you're not going to do regular maintenance on your filter, which you should be doing once a month, you definitely need to change, take these out. But these need to be changed once a month to every two months, if you're really stretching it. These you never change. These always you leave in here. You don't ever clean them, don't do anything with them, don't even look at them. By cleaning them with, you're going to kill all the bacteria that's on it that's helping you out. So, leave those alone. Don't touch them, and don't let them dry out. You need to keep them semi moist. So if you're cleaning out your thing take those and set them in a little tray of water or something. Keep them moist. So, we've got all that, we're going to put this right back in our fluval, and I'll go over how we set up the rest of the fluval for your proper filtration."
eHow Article: Pet Turtles: Filtration Bins