Water trough sump

[Kens Bees]

I’m thinking of putting a 50 gallon Rubbermaid trough in place of my existing sump. It’s long and shallow so it should add more water volume than a typical sump. The space would be awesome with easy access to the skimmer, heaters and roller, not to mention room for live rock/biological filtration.

If you’ve setup something like this did you try any sort of baffles to create a path for the water to flow through? I’d also like a refugium in this and thinking baffles would help keep the chaeto cleaner with flow. I also thought the baffles would concentrate the light in one smaller area.

What about the ato and AWC switches? That much surface area would mean any volume drop from evap or AWC would be a large amount of water. I’m back to baffles for that but in this case they’d need to be water tight and I’m not sure if the container can deal with silicone.

If you have any thoughts please share them, this is in the very early planning stages.

 

[dburr1014]

It's really tough to put in baffles and RTV doesn't really stick to the tub.
I just took out the refuge but I used a small tank in the tub for the refuge. The water from the display just dumped into the tank then spilled over into the tub. Very simple. The other thing you can do is just use a large basket and place into the tub. This way you can have your roller mat from the display doing all the heavy work.

HTH