Originally Posted by
Cove Beach
Hello, looks like a fun build, the 180 is a great footprint. Something to consider about plumbing material is ease of maintenance down the road. I also came from recent saltwater experience, and used both vinyl hose and hard pvc, but in the end went this time with a middle ground of spa-flex. Vinyl is cheap and easy to fit in small sizes but can be a problem as it gets larger and wants to go where it wants to go. Also disconnecting and reinstalling can be a problem. Hard pvc fixes those issues with the use of unions, but it can be noisy. Since it looks like the tank will be in a living room you will want it to be silent as possible. That’s where spa flex will shine. And since your sump is directly below you won’t need much.
One other thing on tank setup with the dual overflows, make sure to level the tank from the bottom glass surface, not the top edge. Start with a level stand, then verify level in the tank bottom otherwise you will have one drain running faster. Adding gate valves to both drains will give you fine adjustments to balance things out.
One question I had is, will you be running just the bio reactor or additional filtration? Something else to consider would be purigen,which would be easy to add a reactor to the sump. I have found using a reactor makes re-generating really simple and fast. Just thoughts from my experience, I’m sure others will chime in. Looking forward to seeing it come to life.