ok guys. so today im buying my live rock. but now dat i have dat out the way im starting to save my a refugium or sump. so i wanna kno which would be a better set up for me..i currently have a FOWLR but definetly little by little it will be a reef...with corals and such. so wats better...should i go refugium or sump? sorry if this was asked before.
only thing i have heard and read on refugiums is that they need to be at least the same size of the display tank to be of much benifiecial use...they look really nice if done right ...but money for money...I'd stick to a sump.........i'd also wait to see what others will have to say on this subject....lol, Boss
i am in the process of building a 20 gal sump for my 10 gal aquarium. it is going to have a chamber for bio-balls, and the rest of the space will be for chaetomorpha macroalgae, mangroves, and bits of live rock. i also am putting in a nano-reef skimmer. so the sump im building is part sump, part refugium. this, compined with my Magnum 250 canister filter should make for a very clean tank... maybe you could try the same?
singapore. not to crush your ideas but the bio balls wont be nedded better yet use live rock and a deep bed of sand your tank will do much better.imo. good luck and lets see them pics..
a 20 gallon sump on a ten gallon tank? is that physically possable? seems like you would only have a problem over pushing water to the 10 gallon or over draining the 10 to the 20...........sorry it just seems confusing to me ....Boss
1.added water volume
2. Place to hide equipment such as heaters, skimmers, probes, etc.
3. Easier to keep microbubbles out of display from skimmer with bubble wall in sump
Why not have both? My display is a 75g and I use a standard 55g as a sump/refugium. I divided with acrylic into 3 eqaul sections. First section has the skimmer where the display drains, second is return area and third is refugium that is supplied by a T off of the return pump.
Having a refugium to grow macroalgae to export nutrients is a big plus.
I have a basketball sized ball a chaetomorpha spinning in my refugium that I prune every week and my nitrates stay below 5ppm.
Growing Xenia is also a great way to export excess nutrients. I just setup a 29g tank as a secondary display refugium plumbed into my sump that houses a pair Perc's, 3in. of aragonite and 30lbs of LR and have a few stalks of PomPom Xenia that I am going to let totally grow over all the rock.
well im planning on upgrading my 10gal tank to a 30 in about 6months. so i figured that i should just build a sump big enough for the 30 now and run it on my 10 for now. i dont see why it wouldnt work. my grandfather is a plumber and we talked about the water flow and how to set it up properly. once i get a new camera, i will put up some pix for you all to see how we set it up. so do u really think i should just forget about the bioballs and go for LR and Macro in the tank? would anyone reccomend any other filter media to put in there? id like to know asap because we are about to build the champers in the sump so yeahhhh
You can keep the bioballs so long as the water that passes over the balls first filters though some kind of filter floss otherwise organics will get trapped and build up in the balls cause nitrate problems.
But, in a reef with enough live rock and sand, the bioballs become redundant and basically pointless and a potential hazard.
In a 30g, you would need 40-60lbs of LR and 1-2in of sand in display or you could do a RDSB in the refugium and also you could put some of the LR in the sump so the display is not so crowded.
Personally, I don't use any mechanical filtration other than skimmer and phosban reactor w/GFO(granular ferric oxide) to absorb phosphates. Once a month for a couple days, I remove the GFO and run carbon in the reactor just in case there is any chemical warfare happening amongst the softies, LPS and SPS coral.
Many different ways to accomplish the same goal but the Berlin method plus sand bed works very well.
PS. You could have the drain to the sump go through a filter sock. This would need to be cleaned once a week or rotate between 2 and always have one clean and ready to go each week.
very helpful information schigara. You saved my alot of hassel. now i dont have to mess around with anymore acrylic. That suff is aweful to cut with a scroll saw...
Just passing along info from my own experience and from many countless others I have learned from.
If you want some really good info from people with the best tanks around the world, read though all the Tank of the Month winners from the past 6 years at reefcentral dot com. There are some incredible systems out there.
