AIO Tank Help

[ZachHuffman]

Hello, I have a waterbox cube 20 AIO aquarium. I have lately been having problems with keeping the return chamber filled. I do not believe that it is because of evaporation because I will fill up the third chamber with water, and in a few hours it will have completely drained it out. I have changed out filter socks and removed media from the middle chamber thinking they were slowing the flow but that did not fix anything. So I am stuck at what else to try to fix it.

 

[TheDragonsReef]

Im going to go with it is evaporation. In an aio the return chambers are pretty small and the volume of water can decrease pretty fast with evaporation. For reference my lidless 50g frag tank goes through 1/2-3/4 of a gallon of water a day. You can expect nearly a 1/8-1/4gallon a day in your tank if you dont have a lid. The best solution is to buy a top off system and if you want to further reduce evaporation you can get a lid.

 

[HawkeyeDJ]

Under perfect conditions, all chambers in an AIO should have close to the same level of water. Water is entering the sump at the same rate as it is being returned to the DT.

Since you have accounted for clogged media (did you look for any blockages between chambers?) and still have low water in the return chamber, it means your return pump is apparently too powerful for that size tank. It is pumping water into the DT faster than it is being drained by the weir.

I'm assuming this is a new problem that has developed, not a problem from the beginning. Therefore my suspicion is there is a blockage somewhere between the weir and the return pump.

 

[BostonReefer300]

In addition to what HawkeyeDJ said, are you using that black rectangular sponge that came with the aquarium? I noticed on my daughter's WB20 that it gets clogged easily and needs to be rinsed out once a week. We keep it in the middle back compartment on top. Also, whenever Kraken Reef gets the filter cup inserts back in stock, I recommend you get one. I put a little filter floss in that and use it instead of a filter sock. I need to change it three times a week, but it's trivial to do it and uses very little filter floss. Good luck!