water all over the place

Don't use a check valve, as they will eventually fail. Not a matter of if, but when. All it takes is a piece of coralline algae to break off and stick between the valve and the casing (or a snail, or a piece of fish food, or a .......), and you have a not-functioning check valve. Just follow the advice about raising your return outlet to just below the water's surface.

 

+1 I agree

 

^^+1000 never put your entire flood prevention on a single device, especially one that is prone to failure. A properly designed system, as mentioned above, should never flood on the event of avower outage/loss.
I also kill my pump when feeding and never have a flood. Siphon breaks are critical!! Also, more details about you're setup would be helpful.

 

Yup, I'm with the no check valve people.

 

Thanks

I justed wanted to say thanks to everyone who responded back to me. this web site is great

 

Pics of what you're using please.

Have you determined why it happened? Where the weak link is that needs to be corrected?

I hope this has helped so that this will never happen again to others, and more importantly, to you.