Connect Multiple Tanks?

RobertP

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Wife and I have been planning to move in the next year or so and I have already had ideas of building a fish room to house the sump for my current tank. Been thinking about large tubs for extra live rock, large fuge tub/tank and definitely a frag tank or two. But also what about another non-reef tank? Maybe a smallish predator tank? Tidal Garden's setup is what got me to thinking about the multi-tanks into one sump. I guess if you keep corals then maybe multiple 40g breeders into one sump would be better than 1 large 130g.

If I upgrade my current 130 gal to a larger tank, I could move the 130g into the fish room with it's current lights and hook it and the new tank all together into a large sump. This would make water changes and maintenance easier. I do realize the risk is if there is a problem in one tank you could lose them both.

Anyone else do this? Or is this generally a bad idea?
 

mlb75

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Nothing wrong with this at all, the only limitation is imagination and the fact that if you have an outbreak of something in one tank they're all hit but to me the ability to have one filtration setup covering multiple tanks outweighs that especially is you want a bunch of different kinds of displays, ie seahorse, coral, predator setup, angels etc. I think it could be a REALLY cool setup to have several large tanks in wall along the same wall with different things in each. A reef setup in the middle with a deep 36" front to back setup (300DD?) with a predator tank on one side in a shallower but taller tank (125?), and maybe two smaller tanks like 40's on the other side with a nem/clown and seahorses in them respectively. All of those could connect back to a common sump, I'd have dedicated return pumps for each but you could even do that with a single pump and manifold if you wanted. In some ways it might even have the positive effects of the "waste" from the other tanks helping to feed the corals and the rock and total water volume helping to keep the water clean from the normally messier predator tanks.
 

ca1ore

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I have run a multi tank system for years, works well as long as the 'final' sump can handle all the overflow. Currently I have a 450 main display that overflows into a 120 refugium, a 60 frag tank, a 30 RDSB and then finally into the main sump (an old Oceanic 150).
 
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RobertP

RobertP

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@mlb75 OK you are killing my budget! I was thinking one display in the house and the other/rest in the fish room. Wife has already said only 1 tank in the house, but then she sees those seahorse tanks and those all clown/anemone tanks! Been having problems keeping my nitrates up (yeah not really a terrible problem to have) and it got me to thinking about other fish only tanks that you cannot really keep with corals. We are thinking around a 300 gal 8ft main display inside the house so no wider than 30"...because I don't want to pull out door frames to get it in the house. With our favorite house plan my plan is to convert one of the garage bays as a fish room and now I might consider putting the tank in there and display into the house. Of course then we could go wider! I wont get crazy dreaming too much until we have the house and can start building the fish room.

After posting this I got to thinking about the LFS and how they have multiple tanks going to one sump and I think a lot of public aquariums do the same thing. So it would be all about sizing the sump to handle all the overflow when you lose power.
 

mlb75

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yea, it's fun spending someone else's money. As for restrictions on the tank size I get that as well but remember a 300DD is only 27" tall (you can believe they did that for a reason) so you just put it on it's side and you're good or if you have french doors they make it easy to get things in as well as long as you don't then have to go much farther. I'm not advocating the 300DD because I've heard of failures but I do love mine and it's been running for years with no issues. I will say once you go to a deeper tank you'll love how it looks and won't go back to a shallower tank. A tall tank is normally a lot of wasted space in a coral system because the corals at the top shade the ones at the bottom and it takes a LOT more light to get PAR deeper.
 

ca1ore

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@mlb75 We are thinking around a 300 gal 8ft main display inside the house so no wider than 30"...because I don't want to pull out door frames to get it in the house.

As long as one dimension is 30" or less you can get through most external doors - doesn't have to be width, can be height. With my 36" wide 450, we just turned it on its back and no problems.
 

Darwin stinton

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I'm thinking about doing this and using the 1 of 2 overflow's from my 12o to feed down to a 30 then it would feed back to my sump. This way gravity would move the water from one to the other and less demand on the pump. Although i do have two pumps but the second is a backup that mostly just feeds a manifold and can be put into the loop in case the main fails.
 

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