hardaur

I've recently installed a weir type overflow on my 100g mixed reef, and due to some extenuating circumstances I wasn't really interested in even spending the $15 or so to pick up something along the lines of an aqualifter to pull air out of the device to keep the siphon going. My initial thought was to just run some airline from the nipple on the overflow down to the sump and just manually start a siphon and let it run. . .life is happy, right? Nope. I have a 2100gph flow powerhead right next to the overflow and every time the wavemaker powers it up it creates a LOT of turbulence right at the weir's intake causing it to take on more air than that siphon can handle.

I'd pretty much given up and resigned myself to picking up a Tom's Aqualifter when I had a great cheap-skate idea yesterday. I dug around and found one of my old AquaClear powerheads that have been gathering dust for probably the best part of a decade (or more) and placed the airline from the weir into the venturi intake of the AquaClear and dropped it into the sump. Abra-capocus (who can name the reference?) a simple and free solution.

Of course, at the end of the day this is a very "duh" solution, but it's just the kind of thing we don't think about when we're trying to solve something like this. As reefkeepers we're often very quick to go shell out a little cash for whatever we need without digging in the closet first. Anyway, maybe this will help somebody else save a buck down the road.

Image requested by Marc: