Thanks sphelps.
I've been racking my brain for the past 2 weeks about this and my head is starting to hurt!
My reef tank is an 80g rimless with a foot print of 48" x 16" and it is not drilled.Because I don’t have the room to house anything under the tank, the sump & refugium will be installed off to one end of the tank. Top of the tank is at 5'.
I picked up an acrylic refugium which is made out of ¼” thick acrylic except for the end pieces which are 3/8”thick. The overall (outside) dimension is 32” long x 14 ¼” high x 14 3/8’ deep. The spaces between the baffles are 4 3/8”, 3 1/16”, 2 7/8”. That leaves an open space of 20 3/8” for cheato + LR (maybe a sand bed as well ?). There is also a 1 1/2" bulkhead whose center is up 3 1/2" from the inside bottom at the baffle end.
Tomorrow I hope to be picking up an industrial shelving unit that is more than strong enough to support this refugium above the main tank at 5 feet and so the refugium will just empty itself after the baffles directly into the tank. Underneath the refugium is where I'll house the sump which is a regular 33g glass tank (36" x 12" x 18") and here is where I got stumped with the height of the baffles. The out flow from the tank to this sump will be a surface skimmer with dual 1 1/4" OD u-tubes with flexible hoses. The main skimmer is 19" tall to the bottom of the collection cup with a diameter of 7". I plan on raising it 3 3/8" with white PVC pipe support and eggcrate (was suggested I do this). The skimmer's footprint is 12" x 12" (approx.) which leaves another 2' of room in this tank (for LR ?) plus the baffles. I mention LR for both sump and refugium because I have an excess of it. Here is a photo of the skimmer:
The pump from the sump to the refugium will be a Rio 2500.Here is a drawing of what I think the whole set up should be (not to scale):
So, Have I figured this out properly? Besides not knowing the height of the baffles in the sump am I still misssing something (besides an ATO which will be next right after I install a tunze wavemaker
)?
Thanks for your time and effort.
Cheers
Richard
BC Mosaic