how many times a hour should the water go through the sump?

[MikeInToronto]

Originally Posted by Bloodasp

I'm gonna use the same car analogy. Going too slow means you are burning all the fuel that goes into the engine but you are not utilizing all the energy that the car is capable of, going too fast and you are not burning all the fuel that goes into the engine. In either case you need more fuel to get to where you want to go. The sweet number according to experts if I am not mistaken which they say would be fuel efficient would be between 60-80.
In a way if you have a tank that is 100 gal and you have a skimmer that has a pump rated at 800 gph and you have a turnover rate of 1 that would just mean that at least the same water goes through the skimmer 8 times. If you have a turnover rate of say 40 that would mean water would just be passing from your tank to your sump without even going to your skimmer. It you go around say 4-8 then the water would at least pass through your skimmer at least once or twice. I think that would be efficient enough. Going too slow and you are just going through water that has already been stripped of all those waste and oil and going too fast and you are not getting stripped at all.

Except that the sump isn't a separate unit; the tank and sump are the same system. The turnover rate should be a non-issue. What is important is that the overflow box is large enough to handle the volume going through it. If your OF is 10' long and is able to extract the surface of the water and not just a lot of water, it is running efficiently. This means you could have 1000x turnover in your 20 gallon tank. The amount skimmed off the surface, whether 10% or 100%, removed by the skimmer is a non-issue because the skimmer can only handle what it's rated for.

I think the issue here is redundant recycling of clean water, not turn over.

This whole argument is theoretical.