In an effort to help explain a simple but often misunderstood topic I decided to write about the making of my wet dry sump.
Why did I decide to make my sump? Well I have a 110 gallon South American tank that was filtered by a Marineland Penguin 330 and 350b. Two very good HOB filters that I messed around with trying to find a good balance for filter media, something inexpensive and effective. I tried the cartridges that came with them and they disintegrated after a couple weeks. I used AC filter foam, but it wouldn't filter fine particles. I then tried register filters wedged behind the filter foam and that clogged too fast. I had to rinse them every two days otherwise it would bypass. Then I decided to run one with foam, and one with the regular filter cartridges. In the case of the one with filter cartridges I used register filters as pre-filters and this worked okay. However I was still unhappy with my mechanical filtration and it still clogged after a few days. Along side this I was running a cascade 1500, but it was running medium foam and ceramic bio media in it because it clogged way too fast for me to disassemble constantly.
If you managed to read all that, you should have gotten one thing out of it. I could not find a way to get enough mechanical filtration because of a lack of room and/or swift clogging. my HOB's were also really really loud. They didn't agree with the sand and replacing impellers didn't seem to help a whole lot. So my choice was either buy another large canister filter, which would still be a pain to pull take apart and clean, or build a wet dry which is something I wanted to do anyway.
My plan was to remove both HOB's and run the cascade 1500 in conjunction with my wet dry so in the worst case scenario one could always back up the other. My priorities were easy of service and to provide excellent mechanical filtration.
The first step was to find a sump. I was going to use a 30gal I already had, but it wouldn't fit under the stand. In the end I settled on a 20 long. I wanted a tank that was 12" wide because my media chamber was going to rest on it. (like this)
Since I was designing my sump with the intention of replacing 2 ~300gph HOB’s I estimated that roughly 500 GPH effective in the tank would suffice. I decided on a Pentair Aquatics quiet one 3000 pump. It is rated at 780 GPH at 0 feet of head height. Using the 3000’s flow chart and estimating about 4 ft (vertical distance between the pump and the end of the line) I estimated
I would see 500-550 GPH effectively in the tank.
Here you can see from this chart that my pump flowed just shy of 600gph at 4 feet. I wanted to slightly above what I was looking for understanding that I could always reduce the flow later on.
Here is the overflow I went with. (My Over Flow)
I was impressed with the overall quality of the pieces considering it was just over $40 shipped.
Most overflows come with 1" PVC fittings on them so I knew I would use this as a starting point.
I went with 1" tubing to make the bend under the stand.
For the sump construction I knew I wanted chambers. This required a trip to the hardware store to have two pieces of glass cut for dividers. I used 7" tall by just under 12" (the inner diameter of the tank). The idea behind the pump divider is that should something happen to the overflow (it gets clogged / looses siphon) the pump will drain the water down until it gets to the 7" mark. At this point it will only have the water in the divided section so it won't pump the entire volume of the sump into the tank. To install the dividers I siliconed them in making sure they were straight and perfectly perpendicular.
If you notice I left the pump in there to make sure there was enough room for the pump.
(first divider all done)
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