Sump/refugium setup

Ya, I can agree with that. Some folks light cheato 24 hrs.... but nothing on this planet was designed to be lighted 24 hours. Run the lights opposite of your tank lights, 16 hrs is fine.

Cheato supports pods, they don't need live rock. They live on algae. Depending on how much flow you have LR can become a ditritus trap in a sump. Not that bad though with a bare bottom. Easy to take care of.

Your skimmer probably needs very little water. See if you can come up with some sort of flow requirment for it... since everything is in line, try to supply just what it needs. That way you are not moving more water than you need to, and your pods will appriciate not living in a river.

 

Cool, thank you for the good info.

 

No sweat. You don't want to skim pods, and you don't want to feed a fuge clean water.... but what you have is fine. I'm not a fan either of LR on a DSB, but bare bottom is easy to clean and sumps accumulate ditritus as it is. So all in all, you increased some volume, added some live rock, got some macro growing and moved your equipment... good deal.

A split design in the furture will give you room for a more powerful skimmer without micro bubbles in the display, a deep sand bed for the fuge to denitrify, and more micro fauna to feed the tank, and slow flow through the fuge.