Very Lucky

Morning all,

Setup my new tank yesterday with inbuilt Overflow box / Sump. When setting up the overflow return i completely forgot about drilling a hole to break the siphon.

I left it like so for another 1-2 hours before i added a piece of RO tubing into the return and thank god i did , 2-3 minutes later after adding the tubing i had a power cut for 20 minutes!

Very lucky indeed or i would of have water everywhere.

Lesson learned

 

You should never depend on a drilled hole.
If the returns are designed properly so they are just under the surface and you maintain the proper amount of freeboard in your sump flooding is never and issue.
My display is 100G, the two 3/4" returns are 3/4" under the surface so are not a noise issue and I only siphon 3 gallons back to my 30G sump in a power outage. That is easy to contain since my skimmer works best with about 8 gallons of spare room in the sump.

If you are depending on drilled holes or check valves it is only a matter of teime before you experience a flood due to a piece of algae, a snail, grains of sand, a wandering anemone , a small dish, floating food or any number of things. Its not a matter of if but when, and that when is usually an the worst possible moment. Remember, it doesn't have to be a catastrophic flood, even a smalll trickle will eventually flood in time.

Move your returns to within an inch of so of the surface and maintain that very easily calculated (LxWx1"/231) amount of spare room in the sump and you can sleep soundly at night!

 

Realized this after gluing the PVC together and now i'm stuck unless i add more joints to make it higher.

Thanks for the advice.

 

Use Loc Line in the tank. It looks better and gives you flexibility to change the flows occasionally by pointing the nozzle in different directions.

 

Brings back some terrible "growing" pain memories. : / Learn as we go.