cyano

Well everything finally came in and so my day was spent putting it all together aside from the bio pellet reactor. I had requested a completely different one but to make a long story short Coral Vue sent me this bohemoth to make up for the delay, unfortunately I have no use for a reactor this big and will be trading it in on one a little more tank size appropriate (if they had sent me a larger skimmer that would be a different story though)


Now that I had all my parts in I decided to get started beginning with a basic frame stand for the sump as this one was getting placed on the other side of the wall from the tank in a storage area. It's very simple in fact I opted to used thise style 2x4 which is actually 1 1/2" x 3 1/2" with rounded corners, but it was lighter and cheaper and lowered the sump a quarter of an inch more than a standard 2"x4" would have (plus these were not cut from twisted up trees, lol.) the sump is 36"x15"x15" so thats exactly what demensions I went with with a stud every 12"


I prefer screws to nails for these types of applications since nails have a tendency to back out over time and the last thing I want to do it touch up around the sump with a hammer, lol. Since I did go with screws it's always a good idea to drill some pilot holes to help reduce the risk of splitting the wood.


Here is the platform/stand after it was all together.


I needed the pump to start plumbing it all together which was still running the old sump so it was turned off meaning that time between pictures increased as I started trying to concentrate a little harder get this thing moving along (3 hours at this point.) As you can see the skimmer fits great in there and since I throttle my pumps back even just slightly with a tee and a valve rather than just a valve (that reduces the stress you put on the pump, less back pressure the longer the pump lasts) I plumbed the fuge feed line through it rather than just back into the water return section to reduce the chance of ripples in the water since thats where the auto top off was going to go.


Fast forward once again and I am adding water to the sump (I also did a water change during all this) tweaking all my valves, getting the skimmer running, dialing it in, and still determining the final water height I wanted to keep in the sump. I also have the chaeto settled in to it's much better newer home with the light and have the fuge flow dialed in to where I want it for the time being (if I open the feed valve just slightly more than a hair i get a chaeto tumbler, that is eventually on my to do list but not what I want now)


I finally have the auto top off installed and making sure it works before I start messing with anything else, don't need any accidents with that thing.

Finally after 9 hours of work the finishing touch was the re-wiring job to get most of the plugs and wires under my tank where the old sump used to be and pull what remains near the sump up off the ground away from any splash potential.


I have learned many things today and I would like to mention to anyone running a wet/dry sump or any sump for that matter as well as refugiums. It is not a well talked about issue that I have read about but make sure you clean the detritus and death from the sump. When I pulled mine out from outside it looked fine but when I started emptying it out I almost threw up and after seeing that I realize that could have very well been a huge part of my problems. So please everyone if no one has mentioned it to you or if you have never read it before that thing needs to be cleaned on a regular basis.

I would like to thank Jess and Marc for the podcasts, I am sure my neighbors don't care for you two very much but I had it turned up listening to you two the entire time I worked on this project!

If anyone has any questions or comments feel free and I will post a few updated pics next week and give an update once the reactor i am willing to use comes in assuming it does