sump design
 

Hi Catherine I think I have the basic idea for your sump setup, see if this will work or if we need to make some changes to this:biggrin:

thanks

http://i938.photobucket.com/albums/a.../cathsump2.jpg
http://i938.photobucket.com/albums/a...cathsump-1.jpg

Good choice Catherine :)

The automatic water change system will change 10gal of water everyday, it will be setup with 2 10gal tanks beside the sump one to hold fresh salt water and one to remove old saltwater, it will be controlled by a controller that I am designing so it will be hands free....one thing I am working on is to get the controller to actually make the salt water as well but need to figure out how to incorporate a salinity probe into my design

10 gallons a day? Wow I hope you're using IO!

well a water change for that much water volume will be about 160Gal, so instead of trying to do one large one we will do a bunch of smaller ones.......maybe 10gal every 2 days not super positive yet but something along those lines.

and no not using IO

I figured you wouldn't be I was sorta speaking from your wallet's perspective =) I think that's a pretty sweet way to change water and a chance to have more gadgets which is fun.

My wallet is telling me that I'll be buying salt in pallets, and it may end up being only 5g a day after we see what kind of impact it has on the tank. There is definitely a balance that will need to be struck here between the costs, the results, and the bioload.

I actually haven't given any thought to the type of salt I want. Everything just keeps changing, and I really don't know what I like/don't like anymore.

Catherine why not Stick with IO I have been using it since 2002 and never had one problem with it. So I couldnt tell you anything else about other salt , to me SALT is salt

In the past I've always received the poorest results when I used IO. We'll just figure out what is available when we're ready I suppose. I used to really like Red Sea salt, and had great results.

give seachem some thought...... its distributed locally(in cowtown) so availability will be easy and very little shipping(if any) costs