High tech tank with sump?

[zozo]

I'm not trying to talk you out of it.. 😉 If you feel like and you mind is set on, it is this you must have, you have to go for it and enjoy it. 🙂 It is a treat to build and a joy to see it function.. Next to the hearing part, that was a bugger in the living room. But that's me.. I just giving my experience and views on the topic title. But a sump doesn't mater how you build it, but if build correctly it only has pro's instead of cons..

Just saying from experience that a fluidized filter chamber in a sufficient planted setup has pro's nor cons.. You won't realy notice a difference when you are not using it and just go for a simple trickle setup.. So the waste of energy is more in thinking, finding and making to whole construction work for something you actualy do not realy need and can be as sufficient with a much more simpler design. The airpump sure probably will be peanuts, but still it is energy.

When it comes to cleaning a sump, in my case i only clean the prefilter mats and the last polishing filter block now and then. The trickle media, doens't need to be cleaned (for years to come). So i guess even if you use only K1 as biomedia you still have a prefilter mat and probably a last stage polishing filter mat which needs regular cleaning once a month or so.

Anyway, lot of people say, fluidized bed filters can be nitrogene bombs.. But in a sufficiently planted setup this very unlikely if the tank is mederatly stocked.
The media aint just feuled enough to produce it.. 🙂

Anyway, succes.. I love to see what you come up with..

 

[Big AL]

Really? I thought you had to clean sump bio media as often as a canister's bio mefia.

 

[foxfish]

I do occasionally rinse my trickle tower bio balls, I pour them into a big bucket of tank water during a water change & stir them around a bit, but only once every year or so.
As far as I know, trickle filters are still the most efficient form of biological filtration - fish tank or sewage farm!
I did read about an pressurised air, trickle tower, that is supposedly more efficient than a none pressurised.
They are run at around 2psi.

 

[zozo]

That's also the thing with overflows and sumps.. A canister setup is more like a closed submersed circulating system, it sucks water from mid to low level of the tank into the canister. This makes a canister become much dirtier, much sooner.

An overflow only skims the surface. Al heavier dirt particles to heavy to ever reach the upper water levels with the circulation will end up on the tanks bottom in the substrate. In comparance a sump cloges much slower if not at all. This is also something you need to experience with how it is setup while it is running.. This also depends on flow speed and if power heads are used for extra circulation. In my case i have just a moderately 4 times turn over flow. And especialy at startup when tanks create a lot of (larger particle) debri from melting leaves, growing and dying algea and wood dust etc. The substarte gets much more dirty than in a canister setup. The first months a had to do a lot of substrate cleaning, because this heavier stuff didn't end up in the filter.

My sump is running about 18 months now, yet never cleaned the biomedia, because it doesn't look like there is anything in there to clean.