I was just about to post! Glad to see your continued interest
You’ll have to forgive me- this is gonna be a LONG one.
Lot of ground to cover on sump design. I have an idea of what I want to do but I’m struggling with a couple finalizing logistics.
So, the DT is a 50cm cube (50cm=19.685”) with a water volume of 30.9 gallons.
I’d like a 45cm cube (45cm=17.716”) as my sump, but I’m not certain that leaves enough room to fit in the stand (which I plan to make out of aluminum extrusion). Need to give that some more thought. A key component of this is whether or not I choose to incorporate a ledge into the stand, like this:
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/building-stand-exact-size-vs-oversized-top.699067/ I‘m leaning towards incorporating a ledge, but I’d love input!
If I choose a flush stand , I’ll use a 40cm cube (40cm=15.748”) with a water volume of 16 gallons as my sump.
I’ve previously spoken to
@rvitko (Roger from Tunze USA) and I’d love to use the 9004 DC skimmer. Although I’m not set on it yet- I’d also consider the PLS-50.
Assuming I use the Tunze 9004, I need about 10” water height in use. I don’t have a good sense of this- but let’s assume that during a power outage, with drilled overflows, my water level will drop 2” (
please correct me if I’m underestimating this for a typical overflow system!). In the 50cm DT, that translates to about 3.25 gallons, give or take. In the 40cm cube sump, very imprecisely accounting for the displacement of the baffles or the neck of the protein skimmer or anything like that, that should translate to about 3.5-4” water gain. And since that translates to about 14” water height in a 15.7 tank, even if a power outage were to flow over my baffles, it wouldn’t flood out of the sump. And if I go with the larger 45cm cube sump, that’s got even more room for the sake of safety.
That’s an important thing to confirm ahead of time, right?
As for sump design, I’m taking a lot of inspiration from the trigger systems platinum 20C. The U-shaped path that the water takes through that sump is a good blueprint.
(Credits & Thanks to
@Daveph68 - this pic was the closest thing I could find to a birdseye view for drawing on)
So here’s the gist of my plan:
The thing I’m working on is figuring out how to build in that spillover chamber. It’s not so much a question of “oh no I don’t have enough space!” as it is of “how to do this intelligently?” That’s why its shown with highlighters instead of a definitive baffle wall- I’m not sure if it makes more sense to sit in the horizontal or vertical orientation (relative to this diagram). Since bulkheads have much larger overall diameters than the nominal PVC size they fit, and 90 degree elbows add to the overall footprint of a PVC assembly:
Sure, if you‘re working with nominally sized 1.5” pvc then the blue dimension would be like 1.5-1.6”, but what about the black dimension? Hard to plan out a tight fitting sump without knowing these sorts of measurements. I’ve been planning around using the 40cm sump just in case i resort to it, but the 45cm cube leaves me a LOT more room to work with for this.
So like, I had planned on running the spillover chamber in the blue orientation, but realized that since a bulkhead on the shared side with the filter roller would require me to make the chamber much wider than the pvc drains themselves need, I’d be taking a LOT of room away from the return chamber:
Notice how the bulkhead ends up being so much wider that the drainpipes would need the chamber to be. But then if I ran it in the red orientation, it would require me to use a bunch of fittings to awkwardly transform the drain pipes from inline horizontally to inline vertically:
Alternatively, I could run the red orientation but have the left side of the drawing line up with the front of the aquarium? But this led me to wonder- what if I did some kinda hybrid solution by using a 90 degree bend? Like this:
Yes: I know this solution is psychotically over complicated. With that said- it would allow the spillover chamber to remain super narrow, and wouldn’t necessarily take room away from the return chamber since the portion of the return pump which isn’t where the tube comes out the top could sit under that bend. With that said, this solution would be hard to pull off in the 40cm, and in the 45cm I think theres enough room to spare that this wouldn’t be really necessary to consider anyways.
The other detail is metric vs imperial. As shown on BRS website, the Reef Factory smart roller has a 40mm tube fitting. And 40mm=1.57”, so you’d assume that means a 40mm nominal metric PVC is closest to A 1.5” nominal imperial PVC, right? Yet, on the BRS website, all three of the available fittings that convert metric sizes to imperial sizes convert a 40mm to a 1.25”. I guess that the metric system must use O.D. for nominal naming whereas we use I.D., or something like that.
I could also use a bit of input on planning redundancy into the dimensions of the sump. It seems like a good idea to have extra room in the skimmer and return chambers in case I ever want to add another media reactor or change return pumps to one a bit larger, but I’m not sure to what extent excess room is
practical vs overzealous. I’d like to run a UV sterilizer (planning on posting a thread with some questions about that soon) and I find the science behind ozone usage absolutely FASCINATING. So, I’d love the room to run more pumps in the future for closed loops and other stuff like that.
Also, I’ve seen people preaching the importance of sump access on here, and I’ve seen a couple instances of people putting their sump on drawer slides so you can pull it out to work on it. I get the sense that is too over complicated, but still figured I’d ask and see if others agreed that was excessive?
But this is how I think and who I am.
