Hello everyone,

One of my (very) long term plans is a Malawi Mbuna Cichlid tank, perhaps 5' in length, no plants but plenty of rock structures and caves. My plans for this project have the tank in a custom made end-room joinery unit with cupboards for the filter/equipment, book shelves, and a space above the tank for a plasma screen TV .

My plans for the filter involves one of those 5 draw plastic storage units, with transparent draws, coloured plastic casing and castors as available from Mitre10/The Warehouse/PlasticBox etc.

Water would flow from two drilled overflows and trickle through the first draw with sponge sheets for mechanical filtration, trickle through the second draw with Eheim Ehfisubstrat for bio filtration, and gather in a bottom draw acting as a sump. The sump would have two heaters, and a pump for return to the tank via a reverse-flow undergravel filter plate.

My plans also include a continuous water change system, with a fresh water inflow into the top of the filter, and an overflow from the sump, which could be plumbed, or, as shown in the design, collect in the very bottom draw which would be emptied as required.

The actual weight of the water in the unit would be minimal, as the sump is the only draw full of water. The castors would be removed for stability.

Although the joinery unit is DEFINITELY a long term plan :lol: , the filter will be easier to put together, the only real expense being the pump, heaters and all the Eheim tubing/taps/coupling pieces.

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions on using one of these mobile storage units as a trickle filter, or on my design in general are very welcome.

henry

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no idea but along with this topic does anyone have some pics they can post of some plumbing for their setups

How large are these drawers? The less volume of water in the sump the more risk evaporation will decrease the water level and suck air into your pump, damaging it and cutting off the filtration. The drawers may be good for holding filter material, but I'd put them inside a larger container to act as the sump, have one or two drawers of filter floss submerged and trickle water down through the other drawers. I like the idea of using those plastic drawers though. It should be easy to clean out the filter and you can get the trickle effect just by punching lots of small holes in the drawer bottoms. Also, if you have them standing alone then you'll spill a lot of water every time you open a drawer since any sitting in the bottom of that drawer would pour out of the bottom onto the floor. If you arrange it so that they don't reach out beyond the rim of a larger sump container when open you'd avoid this.