Carbon for a Fish Tank Filter

"Ok, the next thing we're going to do is activate our carbon. Carbon is very important. This is activated carbon. It absorbs odors, impurities and chemical imbalances, so what we're going to do, we're going to grab it, and rinse it out. Activate it, charge it up. We're going to get it rinsed out real well. And it's kind of heavy and wet here. And very simply, open up the basket. Place it on top of that foam filter that we just put in there. Nice and snug there, and this can be rinsed out once or twice later on. And you can reuse this by doing what I just did later on when you do maintenance on your filter. So now we've got stage two there, very important. Now we're going to move to stage three. This is a recent development. This is a biomatrix. These are very porous, porcelain-like particles. That the main function of them is to provide a culture bed for the beneficial bacteria that we talked about earlier, to thrive in. And as long as oxygen is moving through. Steve, I'm going to ask you to open up that bag here so I can put that, oh, put this in here. But as long as you have oxygen running through these pieces here that beneficial bacteria will be able to thrive and counteract the bad bacteria. So I'm going to add this here, and you can see, see how powdery it is. Get it down there. Tie it up like this, and put it on top. Oh. First of all, we got to rinse it. Got to rinse it. Forgot about that. Almost forgot. Ok, rinse it off. And then we're going to put it right on top here, and there we have it. Now the thing about the matrix here, the biomatrix is very important never to rinse this biomatrix with tap water because in doing so you would kill off all that bacteria that it takes a while to build up. This bacteria takes a few days, really three weeks to reach optimal level. So you never want to take this out and rinse it in tap water. It's very important to use the aquarium water that the fish are already living in to rinse this. So, very important point. Otherwise, you're starting all over. So that's our filter there."