So I have this extra 10 gallon tank just sitting around in my place and I want to do something with it. Seeing that my little 14 gallon is so little and has such little water volume, and the amount of stuff hanging off the back and stuffed into the rear chambers is ridiculous, I want to add this 10 gallon as a sump.
Here's the catch, the tank is up on a kitchen counter and there is nowhere underneath it to do the traditional gravity fed siphon option. There could be a bunch of room behind the tank though, so I thought why not do a pump water up and let gravity take it down to the tank.
Here's the plan:
• Standard 10g AGA tank elevated about 6-7" off the counter
• Drill a hole in the top corner of it and install a bulkhead. This will be the return
a. Failure point 1, if something blocks this bulkhead, shit could get really ugly, strainer and religious checking of it to be sure it never gets clogged
• Place a smallish pump into chamber one of the BC chambers and pump it up to the opposite side of the fuge tank. This will be the feed line.
a. Another failure point, if the power goes out and this line is submerged to deep in fuge, the siphon will flood the display. Plan being to keep this line above the water line
b. Label D in the pictures is a pane that is completely sealing off where the feed line ... uhm... feeds so in case something happened the entire sump would not empty out through the feed line
Flow would go something like this:
Feed pump in Chamber 1 of Biocube up to sump -> water spills over first glass pane which covers length of the tank-> zig zags through 3 other glass panes and into flow into main refuge area -> water then flows under label E -> water returns to tank through bulkhead.
Will this work? What can I do better? What did I miss? What size bulkhead would be best?
Here's the catch, the tank is up on a kitchen counter and there is nowhere underneath it to do the traditional gravity fed siphon option. There could be a bunch of room behind the tank though, so I thought why not do a pump water up and let gravity take it down to the tank.
Here's the plan:
• Standard 10g AGA tank elevated about 6-7" off the counter
• Drill a hole in the top corner of it and install a bulkhead. This will be the return
a. Failure point 1, if something blocks this bulkhead, shit could get really ugly, strainer and religious checking of it to be sure it never gets clogged
• Place a smallish pump into chamber one of the BC chambers and pump it up to the opposite side of the fuge tank. This will be the feed line.
a. Another failure point, if the power goes out and this line is submerged to deep in fuge, the siphon will flood the display. Plan being to keep this line above the water line
b. Label D in the pictures is a pane that is completely sealing off where the feed line ... uhm... feeds so in case something happened the entire sump would not empty out through the feed line
Flow would go something like this:
Feed pump in Chamber 1 of Biocube up to sump -> water spills over first glass pane which covers length of the tank-> zig zags through 3 other glass panes and into flow into main refuge area -> water then flows under label E -> water returns to tank through bulkhead.
Will this work? What can I do better? What did I miss? What size bulkhead would be best?