I've not seen this sump design and I dont know why.

[MJAnderson]

In my never ending quest to silence my tank someone suggested that I lower my drain gph and run it directly into my skimmer (a ASM G3). Secondary effect is that it eliminates bubbles in the output and salt creep. All my needs answered with a couple of holes and pipe. My skimmer currently has the gate vale mod which allows me to redirect output.

I'm wondering if I can redo my sump to just be 2 chambers, the first with my skimmer and return pump and the second with my fuge. The skimmer will ouptut into the fuge about 170gph and it will just pour back over one baffle back into the skimmer/return area. No bubble traps as the skimmer should eliminate them. I have not seen this done which makes me wonder if it won't work but it seems to (at least in my mind).

My tank is 72g and my sump is a 20g long. Eheim 1250 pump.

PS. Double posting this in the newbie section so feel free to ignore there.

[ChemE]

This is exactly the plan for my 190. You also get the benefit of 100% of your raw overflow water going into the skimmer. With an in sump skimmer some or most of the water bypasses the skimmer and is pumped back up to the display. This is rather inefficient as you might imagine.

[schristi69]

I would branch off of your output and flow some into the skimmer and the rest into the sump. Control with a gate valve. You want to have as much contact time in the skimmer as possible. By dumping all of your raw water in to the skimmer you are either going to restrict the flow out of the tank or you are going to have to much flow through your skimmer, restricting contact time and lowering skimmer efficiency.

[Crusty Old Shellback]

This is similar to what i have on my large system. I run 2 sumps on my 400 G tank. The water from my overflow box empties into a 30 G sump. Sitting in that sump is my skimmer. The output of my skimmer is plumbed directly into a 90 G sump. There is some extra water in the 30 G sump and it will overflow thru another pipe that connects to the 90G sump in the fuge area. This seems to work better than the original setup of having the skimmer output flow back into the 30 sump. Now the skimmer always gets fresh surface water from the tank and the extra non skimmed water can flow into the fuge to be filtered there.

On my smaller tank, I have rigged the output of that skimmer to perform similar in that it pours out into the area of the return pump and not back into teh chamber that it draws it's tank water from. This helps insure that the skimmer always gets fresh tank surface water to skim, therefore it removes more of the bad stuff.

[MJAnderson]

Originally posted by schristi69
I would branch off of your output and flow some into the skimmer and the rest into the sump. Control with a gate valve. You want to have as much contact time in the skimmer as possible. By dumping all of your raw water in to the skimmer you are either going to restrict the flow out of the tank or you are going to have to much flow through your skimmer, restricting contact time and lowering skimmer efficiency.

I'm using a fairly low flow for my pump, Eheim 1250 which I think will give me about 170gph which I think is ok for my skimmer. If my skimmer can skim that much, is there any reason to need to control the flow into the skimmer? I had a Mag 7 as my return and was pushing about 420gph which, for that, I would have redirected water. But switched to the smaller pump to save electricity as well as heat/noise.