New Reefer With A Refugium Question

Well you guys thought the sump was well done... I'm more proud of this!!! It still needs to be painted black, cooling fans put in the top, a handle on the front, and the bottom rear 2x3 needs to be trimmed, but its pretty much done... have a look!

 

Holy Kilowatt Batman!!

You got that 6 bulb t 5 fixture at a HD? Awesome!

I'd guess you have to get the bulbs online or LFS, lots of possibilities on bulb combos.

Well done, lets see it light!

 

well done. that things a beast!

 

Oooorrrr.... you could just tee the drain line and control the flow to the fuge.

 

Teeing your drain is easiest. Sending clean water to your display tank. that is the purpose of the sump, clean the water, send it back to the display tank.

supplying with the return pump just recircs water. The point of a "fuge" is to grow pods. why would you potentially want to recirc your pods through your return pump a few times instead of just once and sending them to the display tank.

Controlling flow from the drain allows you to flow how ever much your fuge will handle, too dirty, cut some flow. Too clean, turn it up.

No need for miracle mud. Too expensive. You "should" replace it. You want fine "oolitic" sand. You can use pure plain kitty litter clay.

You can have different macros, but most times one out competes the other and you end up with one.

Photosynthesis controls CO2 in your tank. At night your PH will rise because the lights are off in the main tank. I ran mine reverse cycle, butI would do experiments and track my PH and it was exactly the same every night fuge on or off. People overestimate the power of a small light.

As long as I have looked, I have never found a rule of thumb on size of fuge for a given tank. Or the reason for it. Many give the default answer... bigger is better.

There was an old timer here "Tangster"... real old salt, that said 1/10th display tank.... and you should do 1/10th tank flow. So a 10g "total" volume fuge with 10 gph flow for 100g tank. Now he swore by the flow, that is needed to be really slow. I trusted his opinion, but could not bring myself to do it. That is like a trickle. So I did 100 gph which is still very little.

If you really did want to do 1/3 tank size... well then you would need to "feed" 1/3 tank size. You can grow tons of pods in a small fuge. They do not care. To keep that much sand bed, and that much macro growing to justify the size...well you would have to be a macro farmer trying to produce crops of the stuff. Silly.

You want pods. You want to feed your tank accordingly. You want a skimmer to remove raw waste, and you want your macro or pellets to mop up left over nutrients after the waste has broke down... for all those growing garbage cans of macro... you could save a ton on feeding less.

What you have there is going to work fine.

 

Thats what I thought, I was gonna tee off my drain as I first stated but multiple people said that was a bad idea... I'm running a 1 1/2'' drain that should flow 2100gph gravity fed, and a tee with a valve just gives it less of chance to clog and never the less if I clog a 2100gph drain only running 750gph at the head, I got bigger problems to figure out, rather than why I teed off my drain and not my return!

 

Nothing wrong with teeing off the drain; everyone was just pointing out not to have ball valves on both drains As I said, and a few others agreed, just tee off the drain, run a full size drain line to your skimmer side, and a same size or smaller line, with a ball valve for control, over to your sump.

 

When you tee off, you just need to make sure you have a solid flow of water. The drain has air and water. So you want to tee in such a way that the tee is not on top or side getting a lot of air. Easiest is to just 90 over to skimmer section, then tee off bottom of that line.

If you ran the drain straight down to the skimmer section, then tee'ed off the side over to the fuge, it would not work so well. Know what I mean?

 

Yes I do... 90 over to the inside of my stand, tee off at a 45* toward my fugue with a valve and then straight down to the skimmer side.

 

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