Sump input please

[keigle]

Hi all, I am trying to finalize my sump/refugium set up for my 180 gallon and I would love to hear some of your opinions. Early on I decided that I would like the refugium to be visible under the stand. My plan was to just put it on the right side of the stand and just remove the door. However, when I got my Oceanic stand (with four doors) I found out that the two middle doors open with no center brace between them. Now I am thinking that it would be cooler to have the refugium in the middle with no brace impeding the view. Unfortunately this doesn't leave me room for the Iwaki 30. So I was wondering if it would be bad to put the bulkhead coming out of the back of the sump, I was planning of leaving 5-8" of space back there anyways, and using a larger diameter pvc pipe to run behind the tank over to the other side where there is more room. This would let me access the pump easily, but it would be a pain if I ever had to do anything to the pvc pipe itself. Take a look a the diagram and let me know what you think.

[otolith]

That design should work well. I'm not sure I understand how the refugium is plumbed. However, what you can do is instead of running pvc outside the sump you could run it through the refugium via bulkeads (just have a pvc pipe running in the bottom back of the refugium). Or else you could take some of the depth out of the refugium (so it's sort of "built in" to the sump)and let the water run behind it to your pump. The latter is kind of how my sump is going to be designed.
HTH and didn't sound too confusing.
Derek

[keigle]

Yea, I didn’t really draw it but the refugium will flow into the sump via bulkheads with a PVC skim bar- like the lifereef refugiums. That is a really interesting idea to plumb the sump drain through the refugium. Then I could just put the PVC under the sandbed. It seems to me that the only way that I could get the PVC through two bulkheads in the refugium would be to use the flex PVC so that I could bend it.

[keigle]

Anyone else????