20 gal Tank Plan

[midgetwaiter]

So I've decided that I wanted to change some things about my 15 gal nano to take care of a couple potential issues and I thought I'd see if anyone had some ideas. I have zoas, ricordias, a few softies and an open brain. Only other thing I want to add is a maxima clam, maybe.

First problem is that I'm running about 8 degrees higher than room temp in the tank, that kind of concerns me. It's not a problem yet, it usually hits 81 now but in the summer it could be an issue. One of the reasons for this is that I have 4 powerheads in the tank, 2 rios run the backpack skimmer, one more rio for flow and a zoo med powersweep for kinda lame wave action. Replacing the flow powerheads with a sieo would help probably but I think that the rios on the skimmer put out too much heat for a small tank.

Which brings me to the second problem, if I switch back to the HOB Super Skimmer I bought for this tank I run the risk of dumping water all over the floor, again. I really should have bought a remora.

So I started assembling some peices for a new, slightly bigger tank. I'm going to use a 20 for the display and another for the sump, I thought about going bigger but I already have 24 inch lights. You can see in the picture that I'm going to put in a corner overflow with a stockkman standpipe. I'm going to do return via a 500 g/r pump connected to a SCWD wavemaker that outputs to 2 bulkheads on the back of the tank. I'm going to put a 6" chunk of loc-line on each output so I can direct the flow as needed. The SCWD should switch every 7 seconds or so and leave me with 350 plus g/h flow.

The sump is dived into sections with 2 sets of over / under /over baffles. The first section is to keep some rock and some macro in. I'm hoping the baffles would keep the macro in place, I'm going to space then 3/4 " apart but I'm not sure. Then the skimmer section and finally the bubble trap baffles and return.

Anyone have any suggestions?