The corner filter is a nice tidy unit with great biological stability and a place to hide your equipment.

A variation of the Hamburg Matten Filter is the corner filter. This is where a sheet foam is bent into a 90 degree angle and held in place by glass strips. It forms a corner box that can be filled up with off cuts of Poret foam, heaters and items to buffer the water. It means you have to start with a dry tank as you will have to silicone two strips of glass which hold the foam in place. The glass strips need to be at least 30mm or 1.1" wide. We suggest that the glass strips run the height of the tank.

The benefit is a nice tidy look. If you use a black foam, a dark background and have your light situated at the front, the corner filter all but disappears. This system is excellent for people wanting to use a canister filter to drive the HMF. This is the setup we use most often in our tank makeovers.  If you are wanting to use this technique decide on what type of fish you will be keeping. If it is small community fish we use a 30ppi foam which gives great clarity and when pulled out of the tank for cleaning the dirt does not escape easily. This makes the cleaning process nice and easy.

The tank pictured below originally use a 20ppi foam, we changed that pretty early on to include a 30ppi sheet of foam. This gave us better clarity and when you consider that it will only have small community fish you wont be missing out on the low maintenance benefits.

If you are planning to keep large messy African cichlids we recommend that you use a combination of foams to give long cleaning intervals and great clarity. Fit the 20ppi foam on the outside and the 30ppi on the inside.

This was a tank makeover that we did for a client. The customer was using a large canister filter and we tweaked the filter design, to get the benefit of canister filtration and the HMF. The area behind the foam sheets allows for plenty of space for additional bio-filtration. This is made up of off-cuts of Poret foam. A very successful setup.

"Water quality comes first and everything else follows."