secondhand refugium

[drex_ej]

Hi,

I have a 12 gal eclipse and reading around about refugiums and I'd like to set one up using plants and liverock partially as a bit of natural filtration (as well as a place to cultivate plants to move over to main tank for grazing on). Obviously (at least as far as I've found) they don't make any for that size tank. But there is another thread here about taking a smaller tank and using it as a refugium.

Any info on how to set this up? Still not a 100% on how to keep a constant flow w/o overflowing one side or the other.

Any advice / info would be appreciated.

Eric

P.S. first time poster, thanks.

[Carl_in_Florida]

Welcome to Reefcentral!!

there are a buch of ways to do this. The easiest is to have an overflow from you main tank to the fuge which would be under your tank. Then you would have a pump kick the water back to the main tank.

I have pictures of mine on my site.

I used an old 6 gallon eclipse to do it on mine.

Carl

[skipm]

You could plumb another 12 gallon eclipse (or a six raised to the same height) together with your current tank through a couple of bulkheads and use a small powerhead (like a minijet 404) to feed the refugium, the bulkheads would keep the tanks at the same water level and there wouldn't be any worries about too much water if there was a power failure. Another idea you may want to consider would be adding a float switch to the refugium for water make-up. I would do this in the refugiun since you really wouldn't have any need to run the stock filtration in the refugium. HTH, Skip

[skipm]

I just remembered that I also wanted to say that you need to use extreme caution if you try to drill through the eclipse to add bulkheads, the plastic is pretty brittle so you would need to use a fine toothed holesaw or a dremel tool, also make sure to let the saw do the cutting and not force the drill. Good luck, Skip