how do you keep the filter to keep from clogging so easily

by sam roberts
(houston tx)

I have an filstar xp3 on a 75 gallon tank, The filter ran great until I changed the inhabitants of the tank to south america cichlids (oscars, midus, jack dempseys, green terrors are the main inhabitants). I guess becauuse they are such messy eaters the filter is constantly clogging up. I even changed all the media in the filter with the exception of my biological to all brand new filter media/carbon/biozorb and it only worked for less than a week and everything was all clogged up again. I have a sand substrate, however before changing the fish I never had this problem. What can I do because it is getting very expensive and very frustrating.
A: From your description it sounds like you have too much bio-load for the filter. The simple answer is to buy a bigger filter, add a supplemental filter and or reduce the bio-load by feeding less and reducing the quantity of fish. This is probably the most common error aquarium hobbyists make. When a filter is rated for a certain tank size it also assumes the number and size of the fish in the aquarium will fall within accepted guidelines for successful fishkeeping.