Snorkeler's Cube

It looks really lush and healthy. Thanks for the blog and information. Did you take pictures of the sump beneath? Is the closed loop draining through the base and pumping up through the base as well?

I didn't take good pictures of the sump, but I found a picture someone else took. It is a little old, it shows two skimmers but the current sump has only one skimmer.

On the left you see the return tube going up, with a T to send some water back to the sump, kepping turnover at 1 to 1.5 volume/hour, and most importantly circulate the sump reducing deposits and feeding the scrubber and skimmer with organic matter. Right behind that you see a white thing which is the ATO (water coming from a cabinet to the left of the picture) and some pĺastic tubing that come from the balling (containers also in the cabinet to the left). In this picture there was only one plastic tube, balling under maintenance, currently there are three (KH, Ca, Mg).

On the right you can see the algae scrubber, at the time it was almost empty. Two lights, one red and one growlux. The water box that feeds the scrubber is fed by the return tube, back right hand side, and some supplementary water coming from sump via a small pump.

In the middle, top, the closed loop, with a Tunze DC, but not using any wavemaking motion. His newest design doesn't use an external closed loop, but a pump hidden inside a false rock at the center of the DT, pointing up. Saw that in a nano built with the same system. He claims it is even easier to clean as long as you have enough power wiring coiled with the pump, so you can pull it out without undoing any rockwork or substrate.



[Edit]
Forgot to mention three things:
1. Scrubber lamps on from 9AM to 3AM+1
2. He has a heater in the sump
3. He has a small sock with carbon in the sump. No flow directed through it, just sitting there in the sump.

And this drawing gives an idea how the overflow and return work. The three corners without the glass triangle on top are the overflows. The one with the triangle is the return. (in this drawing the box doesn't have the hole in the middle of the base for the closed look because it is the nano I mentioned, where the closed loop is done with a pump inside the tank, hidden).


In a previous model he had more than one tube connecting to the overflow collection base, but he simplified it to one in his latest models.

This drawing complements the one above, with the custom DIY tubes that connect into the overflow and return boxes under the tank. Forget the red arrows and small strips of glass, that is for a nano model and not relevant to this tank I blogged about:



Finally, how the DIY tube connector is made:



Its face is glued flush to the bottom glass, where the hole is, then a small glass box is built around it to hold it in place. Since there is no significant water pressure, nothing leaks nor fails. Nor does anything accumulate because everything is flush, no steps.

In this picture you can see how the closed loop works, some fancy tubing work, but all DIY:

Thanks for the extra details.