15 Gal sump design (diy)

[Hermie]

Hi all, I'm upgrading my 10 gallon diy sump with a 15 gallon and am currently working on the design.
Take a look, what do you think? Any improvements or recommendations?

From left to right, the chambers:

• Return chamber,
• Skimmer/chemical chamber (5" estimated width)
• Bio + mechanical chamber (5" x 9" estimated footprint)
• Refugium/intake chamber (2 bulk heads as indicated)

I'm considering a few things,

1. Eject the bio chamber so the mechanical chamber extends fully to the bottom of sump. This would allow filter socks as an option. It would somewhat complicate the skimmer/chemical chamber flow.
2. Extend mechanical/bio chamber fully glass-to-glass which forces the heater to be mounted diagonally instead of flat on the sump bottom.

My biggest problems with the current sump:

1. light spillover from refugium causing excess algae growth
2. backflow from return pump, upon shut down, gets too high.
3. excessively high refugium chamber water level
4. sump chamber too small for future skimmer upgrades (3.5" currently), but I am not sure if 5" or 6" is going to be necessary for this new sump. I'll probably have at most a 60 gallon cube as a display, so I'm thinking there are a lot of 5" width skimmers that can fit.

One problem I'm anticipating is that I'll need the possibility to make the skimmer chamber up to 9" high which necessitates all predecessor chamber baffles to be 9" at least.


Materials:

1. 15 gallon Aqueon tank (internal dimensions are 23.5" x 11.75" x 11.5").
2. HD white eggcrate (plastolite)
3. Lexan sheet (polycarbonate I believe)
4. Foam PVC
5. K1 Evolution media (1 litre) for biofiltration

Refugium light:
Newhouse Lighting UFO blue/red grow light ~27 watts,
Zoomed deep dome housing (8.5" diameter footprint)

Current skimmer:
Bubble Magus QQ2

 

[lapin]

Looks ok to me