Small Marine Tank Setup Complete

New Ghetto, Yet Effective Marine Setup, originally uploaded by Geis.

I recently became inspired to setup a 75g+ marine tank in my living room. The plans entailed building a stand and hood that could hold the 75g display tank, as well as store a sump tank underneath. With the new setup, I became aware that I needed a protein skimmer, two new powerheads, a bio/mechanical filter, about 100+ lbs of live rock, and a few other odds and ends.

After totaling the costs, I realized I was quickly going over my intended budget and decided to take a step back and think about how I could geek out about a marine tank without spending so much cash.

During the investigation and research process of the larger setup, I began conversing with Denovich about a number of things I could be building myself that would improve the tank and save me some money. Since I currently have a 30g marine tank (whose inhabitants are now certainly tired of my constant promises of an upgrade), I decided to try my hand at a wet/dry filter and a sump to replace the underpowered, rather ineffective, hanging power filter.

With a few Google searches and much more Mark-D-brain-picking, I came up with a pretty simple and inexpensive design: a 5g rubbermaid container works as the sump, which houses my home-made bio/mechanical bucket filter and a 200gph water pump to push the water back into the tank. On the top of the tank I used a siphoning overflow to drain into an external overflow, which then gravity drains into the sump (or more specifically, into the bio/mech filter.

After a few iterations, I was able to get the siphoning overflow to pull out enough water to match the sump pump's rate of flow back into the tank.

In retrospect, the attachment of the internal overflow box could have been implemented much easier by simply gluing a strong magnet to the back, and then placing another strong magnet on the outside of the tank (similar to the magnets used to remove algae from the tank walls). For now, it's attached by a clamp to the back wall :)

So, looking to the future, now that I have a good proof-of-concept filter in place, I've decided to build a stand and hood for a 50g tank which I have attained free of charge and place this setup in the living room. I should be able to directly transfer the sump and filter to the new setup.

I plan to begin work on the stand and hood this upcoming weekend.