kcress,
Now where do I start... On the first page of the thread was the original design that my wife and I had come up with when I initially modified a double chamber bio ball setup with spray bars, got rid of the bio balls and spray bars and just added sand, the way the water moved through it inspired me to come up with another design. It initially didn't work as planned and I added two additional partitions (the center ones) which hold the sand in place. Unfortunately the picture on the first page is reverse to the above picture. The drilled holes are safety holes so that no chamber can overflow where the water is forced to flow under the partition.
Answers to your questions:
Yes. Water comes in on the right. This goes into a perforated horizontal pipe which was cut to size so that it is wedged precisely into the chamber, drilled to distribute the flow, I also have a thermistor which measures the temp from the display. This goes to a central temperature relay with .1 degree's resolution, it has calibration control, alarms and memory for pre-configured parameters, it will handle (I think) 1500watts. This in turn controls the 4 x 250 watt Jager's in the far left chamber below the return pump, the rational of having multiple heaters of smaller capacity is for failure either off or on by the heater, which are set to about 27 degrees.
Yes. The return is a Eheim 1262
Yes. Raised to prevent display overflow
Yes. Water passes through ceramic noodles, these can be controversial as they do collect detritus however these have a significant amount of pods etc keeping things in check. They also slowly dissolve and release calcium into the water.
The next chamber with the very, very deep sand bed (
http://www.aquaria.com.au/catalog/product_info.php/products_id/7070) was and is an experiment, I didn't know and couldn't find out what the maximum beneficial depth of a sand bed would be, and yes the water moves quite slowly through that section so I have a power head helping to add circulation, a very nice mantis, an urchin (thanks Niko) who looks after the algae. The worms etc seem to be moving deeper into the bed as time passes.
With the other section, the water level was initially intended to run much lower, and the 2nd from the left was supposed to dictate the water level, but I have found that it works better running it a little bit higher, but for safety it should be lower. I also have never really changed it after I added the auto top off and found that the pump would suck in air at a slight drop in sump level. Now that it is auto topped off, I should lower the level. I have a 25 liter container with a float valve connected to a [SIZE=-1]solenoid on a tap then to a 4 stage RO.[/SIZE]
Apart from the two inner sections of glass, the sump was custom made from my design all in 10mm so it's very heavy, the two inner sections I just called a glazier with the measurements and fitted them in with tank safe silicon.
I have all three phases running through separate breakers and filters, so all power is clean and very, very safe. Thanks for your concern.
