My New All-in-one Super Sump Project

I really like that, you should patent it or I might have to steal the idea for when I get around to making my fuge

Regarding the skimming before fuge thing, the suggestion to do that was because when collecting water from the overflow you get a lot of oils and other floating stuff that may not be good for or be beneficial to the fuge - probably doesn't make much of a difference. I've seen them both ways many times and there's no hard evidence one way or the other

 

Thanks!

Give me a large tank and a 4x8 sheet of Plexi and look out ;D

 

First of all, I thought I was PMing you before, but posted instead? I haven't been able to post from my pc at work in months, only PMs, LOL.

I think you mis-understood what I meant in my post there.
I don't really see the point of having 2 separate supply water reserves...
If you want 2 fuges for different experiments, growing pods, hospital tank or whatever, then that's your call.

I'm assuming the water reservoir will have your RODI hooked up to it with a float valve or similar device to make up for evap? This probably doesn't even need to take up as much space as you have in your sketch...

To clarify, I meant, put a few "T"s on your tank water to fuge supply.

Have one T off outlet with an adjustable valve go to fuge #1, and adjust it for whatever slow (10-12 gph) rate you want.
Have the second outlet with an adjustable valve go to fuge #2, and adjust it for the same or whatever flow, maybe faster for your chateo?
Then have the 3rd T (which should have about 75% of your water flow from the main tank) go to the open part of your sump with the skimmer and reactor in it. You want the water coming into the part of your sump where your skimmer is with lots of flow and turbulence in order to keep that dirty water stirred up - this way the skimmer is much more effective at removing that stuff. The way you have the sump designed now, it allows the crap in the water from the tank more time/distance to settle to the bottom of your sump before the skimmer pump picks it up.

I'm also not sure what you mean by having 3 pumps in there? I'm assuming a small pump sized for your skimmer ~500 gph, one small one for your reactor, and the main pump to return water to your tank. That should be all you need. If you want to add carbon/phosphate remover media, etc somewhere in there, you could always just hang a bag of carbon in front of the main sump supply to the skimmer part of the sump.

 

The idea behind the two water reserves is so that I can put a 2 week supply of different supplement solutions into each resivoir, and have them auto dose from each on alternate days... can be useful if you are dosing chemicals that cannot be dosed together

I have to carry water in to fill the reserve tanks and my system evaps approx 4 gallons/day so I need ALOT of reserve! I would like to have approx 60 gallons of reserve in the system, that would give me about a 2 week supply.

The water rail design accomplishis the "T"'s and I think makes for a cleaner design, but either would work. With this design there is one hose in and one hose out

Not sure how much turbulance there will be in the skimmer chamber, but I think it will be sufficient in the latest design concept (V3)... I'm sure that when the acutal construction takes place I will discover improvements and changes that I will need to make -- thats half the fun!

 

pdcco your making this way to complicated, might want to re-think what your doing.

 

LOL, I totally agree with the "way to complicated"... This is complete overkill on so many levels.

There are levels of complexity here that could be removed to be sure, I just enjoy the challenge of designing systems like this. It's an art form for me; and if it works -- its a functioning work of art that is truely a thing of beauty.

 

Its not complicated.....like he said he wanted to experiment with design...

I've seen sumps much more complex one on youtube

 

infamous and pdcco: thats all well and good, happy for ya, put some time into those systems and youll find out that kiss [keep it simple s(insert her)] works better, less to go wrong.

 

For anyone that is interested I finally built this crazy thing ;D

After a few more revisions I finally settled on a design for my sump/fuge/auto top-off system. I decided to take to heart a few of the comments from reef_guru and simplify the design somewhat. Now that the system has been up and running for a few months I am glad that I did.

Here is the schematic of the design:

It took me a few weeks to build the system (I am kicking myself for not taking pictures during the construction phase) but the end results have been fantastic!

I live in a cool environment and by placing the heaters in a tight water column; I have gone from needing over 1000 watts to less than 500 watts to keep a stable temp in my tank! The flow to the fuge portion of the system is controlled by four ¾” in ball valves tapped into the feed column of the system.

The make-up water reservoirs are connected to each other with a standard bulk head fitting, so they can act as two separate reservoirs if I choose to auto dose supplements from each or as a single reservoir if the bulk head fitting is removed. Each reservoir has a small dosing pump attached to a liquid level controller to handle the auto top-off operation.

With this design there is no need to use a “T” valve to control flow rates to individual areas of the system; that is all taken care of in the internal design -- One line in from the display tank, one line out to the return pump.

If anyone is interested in seeing some pictures of the installed product you can check out my tank thread in the signature portion below.

 

the end result looks nice i need to set mine up this weekend cant wait