I strayed away from convention with a few aspects of the design for the sump on my 2000L tank so I thought I'd share an update of how it is going. In a word; great! Here's a pic of the whole thing in it's unfinished wooden cabinet, it is 2200mm long, 500mm wide, 600mm high.
Water flows in at the left via two 50mm drains, under a baffle into the settling chamber (where the pothos are growing), then through four sheets of Poret foam (10, 20, 20, 30PPI), then through 20L of Pond Matrix plus some bioballs and ceramic rings, over five 300W heaters running on a custom controller, then returned to the tank via a Laguna PJ11000 with 40mm plumbing.
The Poret foam is doing a good enough job of clearing the water, not as good as socks [obviously] but with Panaques I'm never going to have gin-clear water, and was more interested in getting a decent length of time between cleans than catching every last particle. I am noticing some gunk building up in the pond matrix, and I'm considering replacing it with a K1 moving bed to reduce/eliminate the need to clean the bio media. I'm cleaning the first two sheets of Poret every fortnight, and the back two about every second or third time.
As for the settling chamber, it is also working very well. I'm siphoning it weekly with each water change, but could easily leave it for two weeks between cleans. This time round I put the end of the siphon hose into a piece of filter wool to try show how much waste/sawdust it is catching, and in actually clogged the wool and overflowed the bucket! I estimate that what you can see in the pic is about 2/3 of what I remove every week. I'm also hoping as the Pothos roots grow it will become even more efficient at catching the particulate waste before it gets to the foam. So here's the pics;
Settling chamber before cleaning
After cleaning
What came out
Obviously this sort of set up isn't for everyone, and making it work where the sump has to sit in a cabinet under the tank could be difficult, but for keeping Panaques that make a huge amount of sawdust it is brilliant. There are only four 18-20cm L190 in the tank, I hate to think what it will be like when they're all 14"+!!
Water flows in at the left via two 50mm drains, under a baffle into the settling chamber (where the pothos are growing), then through four sheets of Poret foam (10, 20, 20, 30PPI), then through 20L of Pond Matrix plus some bioballs and ceramic rings, over five 300W heaters running on a custom controller, then returned to the tank via a Laguna PJ11000 with 40mm plumbing.
The Poret foam is doing a good enough job of clearing the water, not as good as socks [obviously] but with Panaques I'm never going to have gin-clear water, and was more interested in getting a decent length of time between cleans than catching every last particle. I am noticing some gunk building up in the pond matrix, and I'm considering replacing it with a K1 moving bed to reduce/eliminate the need to clean the bio media. I'm cleaning the first two sheets of Poret every fortnight, and the back two about every second or third time.
As for the settling chamber, it is also working very well. I'm siphoning it weekly with each water change, but could easily leave it for two weeks between cleans. This time round I put the end of the siphon hose into a piece of filter wool to try show how much waste/sawdust it is catching, and in actually clogged the wool and overflowed the bucket! I estimate that what you can see in the pic is about 2/3 of what I remove every week. I'm also hoping as the Pothos roots grow it will become even more efficient at catching the particulate waste before it gets to the foam. So here's the pics;
Settling chamber before cleaning
After cleaning
What came out
Obviously this sort of set up isn't for everyone, and making it work where the sump has to sit in a cabinet under the tank could be difficult, but for keeping Panaques that make a huge amount of sawdust it is brilliant. There are only four 18-20cm L190 in the tank, I hate to think what it will be like when they're all 14"+!!
