Gozer_1

Ok so now that the I knew what I wanted to use the sump space for, how much room I had to work with, and the tank size for the sump it was time to plan how the sump would be configured.

There are many ways to configure a sump so I'll stick to what I did for simplicity. I decided to place the return section in the center of the sump with the refugium on one side and the skimmer/filter on the other. This allows you to have a larger refugium section.

Now the queston is, how do I section off the tank? I looked at a bunch of pictures and watched one flow till I got a handle on how it all works. It feels a little tricky at first but seeing it in action really helps. I took a long time running through ideas of how to direct water through the sump and in the end still didn't have it quite right. I'll spare you the in between stuff and skip right to the finished product. I made my partitions from plexiglass I purchased at Home Depot. I used the thicker sheets to help avoid bowing and such. Keep in mind that thicker plexi is harder to cut. I highly recommend having atleast a Dremel with the cutting tool for this. A table saw would be nice. You want to be able to get the smoothest straightest edges you can. I cut some with a plexi knife and it worked well but is a miserable blister inducing job. For this project a Dremel and some practice will be fine. Nothing I did is actually supporting the main water weight. I left that up to a tank manufacturer.

Armed with a Dremel and some sheets of plexi I started with the two main dividers. (Bare in mind that this is more of an "I should have" kind of explaintion of what I did. I had a lot of trial and error as I said) I measured the inside width of the 20 gallon tank. It was 11 and 7/8s inches wide. This number should be around 12 for a 20 gallon. I also measured the inside height at about 16 inches. here's the first thing to take in to account. You have 16 inches but you want some room left over in the sump to prevent overflow. (I'll explain that later) A good rule of thumb is to make your main dividers 2 inches shorter than the height of the tank. So mine are 14 inches tall. Now ready to cut I marked out a 12 by 14 and 1/4 inch rectangle. You want to leave extra for fine tuning the fit. I recommend the planner attachment for the Dremel. Again it takes some practice but will work great. You can plane the edges you cut till the divider fits snuggly in the tank. Now that you have your dividers for the two sides you can move them around and think about how much space you want in each section. The only trick here is leaving enough room in the return section for the tank to drain in to in a power outage. A few gallons of water will drain into the sump if the power goes out. The drain tubes empty out and the return line back siphons to the air inlet at the water surface. I basically eyeballed how much water would be in the tubing and added the volume of 2 inches of the surface of my display and planned for that much space. It ended up being a lot more than in reality so I could have made a larger refugium. Mine drains off about 3 gallons of water so I need to leave an extra 3 gallons in the return section. Remember that 2 inches at the top. Well that 2 inches is about 2.5 gallons. So we need another half gallon extra in the return. My pump needs 3 inches of water to operate so if we make the return section 6 inches wide we'll have plenty of room. Now we know the two divders will be 6 inches apart but where do they go? It's best to have the largest refugium section you can. You have 18 inches to work with. I would go with 6 and 12. One divider goes 12 inches from one side and the other goes 6 in.

Now how do you get the water from section to section? You need spillways. These will be 2 inch cut outs in the main dividers. You want to make a 2 by 2 square cut out on one top corner of each divider. This is where the water will spill into your bubble trap which I'll explain later. First we need to finish the main dividers.

I wanted the filter side to have 2 compartments. One for the skimmer and one for filter media. To do this I made another divider. This one 14 by 6. At one end I cut a 2.5 inch by 5.5 inch rectangle to allow water to flow under. The uncut 0.5 inch (5.5 instead of 6) is to help support the divider at the bottom. You want to glue this to the center of the main divider using super glue and corner clamps. Make sure the cut out is opposite the cut out spillway on the main divider. You want the water to flow under the mini divider. Voila, two chambers. You can now glue this main divider into place. Place a square on the outside edge of the tank an line up the, hopefully, snug fitting main divider inside. Once the divider is straight and in place you can silicone the seams. Run a bead down the seam and use your finger to smeer it in. May take some practice to get it to look as good as a store bought tank lol. When all the seams are sealed your fliter section is done for now. On to the refugium side. You can just glue it into place. Make sure the spillways for both main dividers are on the same side. Your return pump will be opposite these spillways. Next time I'll get into the flow box I put on the refugium divider to have the water at the bottom of the refugium be the water that spills out. It will help move some pods and such in to the display and will encourage the water to flow through refugium. For now I must sleep. Hope no one is too terribly bored or confused. Knew I should have taken pictures at each phase. DOH

agsansoo

Wow ... You've come a long way in such a short time ! Can't wait to see your sump construction thread !

Gozer_1

So now we have a three sections, 4 if you count the divided filter section. We know the water will drain from the tank and be split between the two end sections, refugium and filter. This water will fill the two sections and spill in to the middle return section. One last thing to cover here is the flow box in the refugium. For this I took two 4" X 8" pieces of plexi and glued them in to a long corner shape using super glue and corner clamps. When this was set I glued it to the refugium main divider and tank side inside the refugium so that it creates a box around the spillway. This will force the overflowing water to come from the bottom of the refugium instead of the top. As I said this will help get pods and such to get moved in to the main display.

Now that we have the water spilling into the return section we need to think about bubbles. The water level in the return section will be lower than then the other two sections. The spilling water falling whatever distance to the water below will draw air in to the water creating a ton of bubbles and noise. These bubbles are not just annoying. Air flowing through a water pump is called cavitation and is not good for your pump. To prevent these bubbles we need a trap. This trap will allow the air to escape before reaching the return pump and help quite the sump operation. For this we'll need a few small pieces of plexi to create a series of baffles or dividers that will sort of step the water down in to the sump. The first will line up with your two inch spillways. It needs to fit snuggly between the two main dividers and will be glued later. This divider needs to be 12 inches tall by 6 inches wide (or snug fit in return section). At the bottom of this piece you need to cut out a 5" by 2" slot. Leave about a half inch on each side of the cut out to support the baffle. The water will flow under this after spilling out from the side sections. The next baffle will be 6" by 9" with no cut outs. The water needs to flow over this one and it should be about 2" away from the first baffle. No need to be perfect here just make sure it fits snug. The next will be 9" by 6" with another 2" by 5" cut out at the bottom for the water to flow under. Another that is 6" by 6" with another 6" by 6" with the bottom cut after it may be necessary. It depends on the water level in the actual pump area. If it's much less than 6" you may want some extra baffling. 6" or more and the first couple baffles will do the trick. These baffles can be tricky to glue in place and get sealed so make sure to leave yourself room to do it. They can be as far a part as you have room for, and they can be as high or low (more or less than 9") as needed for noise reduction. The return water level will be determined when the sump is hooked up. Till then we don't totally know how much water will drain down to the sump. I way over estimated for mine and really don't need the bubble trap baffles as long as I keep up on topping off.

At this point you may feel a little confused and I didn't take pictures while building mine so I'll try to give you a description. When this is hooked up you'll have two lines of water coming into the sump. One will drain in to the first section of the filter section. Here you'll have your biomedia mainly and mechanical if you so choose. (I do not) The water will then flow up in to the next chamber in the filter section. This is where you want to put your skimmer pump and return. I use a removable divider to direct the skimmer out put through some chemical media. From this skimmer section the water will spill into the return. On the other side the drain water will enter the sump and flow under the flow box and spill in to the return section. These two spillways will dump into a single small section where it will flow under then over through a couple baffles helping it to ditch the bubbles and silence the falling water sound. After this it goes to the return pump and goes back to the display.

With all this stuff glued in and set we have our selves an official sump. It'll need to refined once it goes into action. You want to leak test your sections and you should set up some tubing and use your return pump to pump water through the sump. You'll just need a Tee and some tubing. Set it up so the pump puts the water in to the two outside sections and spills back into the return. This will give you an idea of what noise it will make and what adjustments you can make. Play with it in the tub for awhile till you get the idea of how the flow works. When you have it figured out you're ready for plumbing which will be my next topic.

A quick note on this quick guide. I'll be building a 20 gallon long version of the same thing in a month or so. I need the shorter tank to better accomodate my skimmer collection cup. When I do that I'll take pictures and do a much more detailed write up. This is just a quick overview mostly to satisfy my urge to say, "Look Look Look what I did" lol. Anyway, thanks again for reading.

Gozer_1

Ok, so I've learned a lot about the flow of water in a sump having one set up. I have found a few fundamental problems with my first design. Seeing this in action shed a lot of light in areas I hadn't expected darkness. Because of this I've decided to put this DIY talk on hold, well sort of. I'll start a new thread in the DIY section and post a link here. I want to get back to more strictly refugium stuff here. The new thread will be a DIY for a 20 Gal long sump/fuge. I have a much better idea and design as well as these things called photos. Who'd have thought photos could mean something, right. I have the first couple parts ready. I hope to start resizing the pics tomorrow. I'll also post the new topic then. It will be an untested design so I won't make too many promises, but I have a great idea in mind. It will allow me to use half the tank as a refugium. I only have just over 1/3 in the 20 tall and I can't remove the collection cup from my Remora. I have to siphon the gunk with airline tubing and a careful suck on the end. I don't want to drink skimate. I dread the thought. I need a shorter sump, period.

Anyway, on the refugium note. What can I add to the DSB? I wan't to add a bunch of nassarius snails which will help, but what else will help? I'll have about 4 inches +. I don't know if I want too many algea eating snails. I want the algea to grow so I can physically remove the nutrients. So, ceriths are kind of out. The main goal for my refugium is to be the best little copepod home ever. Right now I have two small pieces of live rock. One of which I paid WAY too much for. I bought it as a "copepod 'condo' filled with live copepods". I haven't seen a population boom in the week since I put in the fuge. We'll see. Live rock is often disappointing at first. Still, I paid $40 where I should have only paid $20. It's really just a piece of rock that had a dead hermit on it. Probably died in transit. Anyway, tell me what kind of things you've added to your refugiums. Including macros and all.