I'll agree that the redsea is the gold standard. I don't know if the trade off of consumable filter roll vs. Filter socks is really worth it. Not sustainable and a constant expense... no thanks. I'll stick with my socks.
For me personally, having the roller has been great. It means for the most part all I have to do is open the cabinet to have a look once in a while and see how much of the roll is left (this is usually looked at almost on the daily to monitor ATO/Skimmate levels anyway, at least for me).
I've got a Klir 4" Di-4. It dropped into my existing sock holders on my Waterbox so no modification to sump necessary.
It's been okay. Had some early issues with it not being strong enough to wind the fleece because the used fleece roll was bunching up or something in a spot, once that was sorted and realigned it's been ok. It also seems to have some fail safe so it doesn't burn through the roll too which is nice.
Ie. if you have a lot of crud in the tank that the roll is taking out in a short space of time. If it rolls a number of times (not quite sure how many), in a period of time it seems to stop rolling and just start beeping at you for you to hit the button to acknowledge it. It's done this a few times for me when I've been trying to dust off my dinos and let the fleece take it out.
I will say this system is a pain in the butt in terms of when it comes to changing out the rolls. It's not an easy process, it's a little awkward and requires pulling the whole unit completely out and having to rethread the roll through the rollers manually etc. I've also had a number of times where I've run short on rolls and wasn't able to find some easily from LFS or online suppliers within the country (not located in the US so ymmv). The last couple of times I've reordered 5 at a time and when I get down to 1-2 spares I look to reorder more to allow me time to source them.
Each roll seems to last about 3-6 weeks I think depending on how clean the tank has been. As I'm going through the dino issue it's using it up at a faster rate than normal and I would HATE to have to deal with socks clogging up every couple of days or so if I still had them.
Also keeps the missus happy because I'm not washing the socks in the washing machine anymore
From a video I watched it seemed the Redsea reefmat looked like you pull out some middle piece, install the new roll and then reinstall the middle piece which has the rollers etc. and it pushes it down into the unit. It looked like a much simpler process, but as I don't have one myself I can't be sure that's how it works. I'll certainly be checking these out myself when the next tank comes along.
