Quote:
Originally Posted by sphelps
Your return pump flow rate is independent from your skimmer flow rate, hence matching them doesn't serve a purpose. Unless you feed your overflow water directly into your skimmer you have no way of really assuring overflow water isn't bypassed anyway. Typically a skimmer sits in a sump chamber, and water flows through the chamber to the next. You'll have a very hard time trying to come up with a system that insure overflow water enters your skimmer only once prior to moving on and that no water from the overflow can bypass the skimmer before moving on. Your skimmer is already designed with the correct pump for skimmer contact time so you're better off insuring your skimmer chamber gets a decent turnover rate, once equilibrium hits and your skimmer is sizes accordingly to bio load it really makes no difference what turnover rate your sump skimmer chamber sees. It makes more sense to size your return pump to properly skim your display tank and keep organics from settling.
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Your right you can't be assured your skimmer is going to skim all the water coming into the chamber, hence the reason why you try and match it.
You want to try and "Capture" as much water from the DT with your skimmer as possible. Obviously your skimmer is not going to get all the water from your DT, but why would you want your DT draining twice as much water as the skimmer can take up? Ultimately, you are limited by your drains and how much they can handle (depends on the method you want to employ here). A herbie or Bean method can handle much more water then a standard durso.
The other variable at play here is your sump size. Having a smallish sump with a HUGE pump is going to move the water through the sump WAY to fast and really defeat the purpose of the sump. (that is if the purpose of your sump is to filter your DT water)
I don't use my return pump to keep organics from settling, I use powerheads. My return pump is used to get water from the DT to the sump for filtration.