suphew

No reason it wouldn't work, the idea is basically the same as used on a lot of the newer tanks with built in filters in their hoods. If it was me would simplify it a little bit. If you put the heater into the fish area and use a spray bar you would gain a lot of space need 1 less divider and the extra air feed into the filter system (by the spray bar) would make your filter more efficient. Also I'm not sure your over flow needs to be in a box. I'm not sure it would make much difference to keeping the fry in and there is no need to surface skim in a fresh water tank like there is with salt water.

I'm not a builder but was working building houses for the past couple of years. I have no doubt that it will be 10's of thousands not just a couple. When we were getting a permit to just pour a slab (let alone permitting the rest of the job) it was costing round 10k in council fees, and we were knocking up the same houses over and over next to each other so it's not like they had to do any work. You would need to get all sorts of engineers reports before you even started going to the council. Sorry if I've burst your bubble but with all the leaky home etc problems there is no cheap building anymore. If you want to look into more deeply send me a PM my Mother in law just had a room excavated and stairwell put down to their garage in upper hutt, she could give you an idea of what was involved

I'm currently running an Arcadia tube and I like it alot. But have had mixed results with their fittings, the really old black boxes are good seem to go for ever but are only T8, but I have two newer T5 ballasts and they have both broken, thank fulling one was only loose wires so I got it up and running again. I haven't tried their "light hood" setups but seem to remeber reading a few posts with similar problems to mine with the ballasts. The Glo units seem to be okay and a resonable price, they use 30 odd of them to run the tanks at The Pet Center in Porirua and have had no problems with them so far.

Just to clarify, RO/DI is used in marine tanks for a few reason. But mainly because corals etc are very sensitive to a lot of the heavy metals from commonly in tap water, particularly copper. Since RO/DI water is used to topup evaporated water the levels of heavy metal build up if you don't use filtered water (cause the heavy metals don't evaporate). With regards drinking RO/DI water, it is no different from the pure drinking water you buy from the super market (in fact some small marine tank owners just use supermarket water), and a lot of the better under sink water filters are RO/DI. I think the myth was just started my reefer's to stop their wife's from wanting to drink their topup water supplies. :bounce:

I think it's about time they started locking these guys up. If you got caught robbing a bank for a few grand you would go to jail for a long time. They are robbing the country of almost $200,000 and from the sound of the travel they have been doing that's just the tip of the iceberg

For fresh water the only real benefits I can think of are complete control over what goes into your tank (which is very rarely neccessary) provides very soft water, which maybe helpful for some fish, for example breeding discus. But rain water can work just as well. if you have a poor water supply and are worried about bacteria, heavry metals etc, in which case you should look at having one that does your drinking water to.

If your wanting to have a good planted tank the more lights the better, it's often a limiting factor for both plant growth and the types of plants you can keep.

Hi Andy, please update your profile with your location, that way help can be a bit more location specific

You don't need to regulate the flow of your pump. A 600lph pump is unlikely to be strong enough, the 600lph is at zero head, by the time you pump the water back up to your tank it likely there will be no flow. The quick and easy way to work out how strong your pump needs to be is to measure the distance from the upper level of the water in your sump to the upper level of the water in the display. This is your static head height, add half again this allows for plumbing elbows, taps, etc that all slow the flow. This number gives you total head height, most good pumps will have a flow curve printed on the side of the bow, find your head height and you'll see what sort of flow you will get. Livingart will correct me if I'm wrong (I work more with marine sumps) but I think you should be aiming for about 3-5 times the volume of your display through your sump. So for example for a 200liter tank you would be looking for about 600-1000lph use your total head height calculation to find a pump that will deliver that much flow to your tank. HTH

I'd be interested to know why you think a sump wont give you clear water? And also how having massive currents would help? The strong flow in reef tanks (amongst other things) work to keep detritus suspended in the water column so it goes over the overflows. This is because reef tank overflows are designed to take the top layer of water out of the tank where the proteins are. It is very easy to make an overflow to take water from the bottom layers of the tank just as a canister filter would. When it comes right down to it, the way to get the clearest water is to use carbon and lots of it, a sump will give you huge capacity for running carbon. Any carbon you run in a canister or internal filter will be at the expensive of biological media.

A trickle filter is far more efficent then most other types of filters because of the high air to water ratio, there's a lot more to it than just more volume of media and water flow.

Media for your sump. Regards the canister filter, why do still want to run it? It will give you so little filtration compared to the sump, I really wouldn't think it was worth the hassle. I guess if you set up a lot of temporary tanks and want a cycled running filter to be able to put on them its a good idea.

The Pet Center in Wellington have sold out of them.

How much the sump will aerate the water depends completely on how you set up the sump. The biological parts of your filter well be less affective than they would be if you set up a trickle filter but will still offer far more volume of media than any canister ever will. Really there are 3 reason's that you would add a sump, 1) increasing filtration, for some reason the current trend is all about LPH through a filter(??!) I checked a couple of sites to find out how much media an FX5 holds and none of them have it listed. Biological/bacteria need surface area, the more media space you have the better you filtration must be. You can not beat a sump for this. 2) removing equipment from the display, speaks for itself really 3) Increasing water volume, great way to have a busy over stocked looking tank, with out having an over stocked tank Running a sump is very easy, marine tanks have been doing it for years, the cost are, the sump, a pump, and some plumbing, should be very easy to do for less than the cost of an FX5 and far more affective.

It is far safer to either drill the tank high up, or build an overflow box as is done in salt water tanks. Using one way valves or ballcocks is just asking for trouble IMHO all it takes is a bit of gravel going down the pipe, or snail, or algae, or dead fish, or...... It is easy to design a risk (or very at least very low risk) plumbing system for a sump, have a look on some of the marine websites for ideas.

I've read that boiling with a little baking soda helps get it to sink. personally I chuck mine in my pond until it sinks and I'm ready to use

There used to be one in the Bio lab when I was at school I've wanted one ever since.

http://fins.actwin.com/aquatic-plants/month.9506/msg00121.html The posters question was how to raise their Kh to the correct levels for their cichlids

If you do this, I suggest you put the heater as low as possible and it must be below the lowest amount of water your return pump can pump. If the drain from your display gets blocked you will have a flood and your sump water level will drop until the return pump runs out of water. This would suck, but it will suck more if you also burn out your heaters and all the collateral damage that might cause like breaking the glass bottom of your sump.

I'm not a chemist so what are saying may well be true Alan, but in the real world of actually testing our water, calcium tests measure the calcium levels, magnesium tests measure the magnesium levels, and KH/Alk tests measure the Carbonate hardness. I have all three Salifert test kits sitting in front of me now and it's spelled out pretty clearly on the boxes. http://www.marinedepot.com/Salifert_KH_Alkalinity_Test_Kit_Alkalinity_(KH)_Test_Kits_for_Saltwater_Aquariums-Salifert-SF1123-FITKAL-vi.html I'm constantly monitoring and adjusting the levels of all 3 (ca mg and Kh) in my marine tank, and watch my lip's, I can have very high levels of Calcium and Magnesium and very low levels of hardness, similarly I can have very high Alk/hardness levels and low ca/mg levels. The 3 are of course very closely related and levels do affect each other BUT they are different things.

Yes you can do lots of things with canister filters besides what the are designed for, but they are a not substitute for a sump, it's very hard to get a heater, auto topup, or skimmer into a canister filter.

Your spot on there, larger volumes make marine keeping so much easier. The key to success in marine is stablity, most water parameters actually have quite a wide acceptable range the trick is keep that level constant. This gets very hard to do in a small volume of water.

Flow isn't an issue, cannister filters with normal media turn your waste into nitrate which is a big no no for marine tanks. A sump in marine tanks is used to hold equipment rather than filter media.

No but very clean water is. Usually a skimmer is the easiest way to do this, but when you can change all your water with two buckets.....

Personally I'd make they at least big enough to have your fist in sideways (ie have a good hold on something and be able to turn your hand round) if you have small hands 100mm might be enough. I wouldn't focus too much on the heater, there are plenty of ways work round heaters, eg getting two 150w instead of the single 300w will save you length plus give you redundancy and a safety net if one jams on.