Display fuge, plumbing advice?

[JakeMonast]

Hi all, so as the title states, I’m planning on building and addition to my 40br mixed reef using a 10g I drilled as a display fuge of to the side. I have 90% of it figured out but my dilemma is as follows. Any and all advice is greatly appreciated!

The easiest way for me to plumb the fuge would be sending part of my return manifold to the fuge and then looping the O/F of the fuge to the area in which my DT’s o/f comes into the sump (or simply after the skimmer where the return pump sits). It would be the quickest route, least equipment, and with vinyl tubing would be the easiest to rearrange, etc.

My goal with this fuge is to create a habitat for hitchhikers, pods and inverts. The way I want to plumb it seems counterintuitive though as the fuge would receive water at the end of my mechanical filtration and pods dropping out would be forced through all of that afterwards anyway and even with 10% of the return pump’s flow, it will still receive a small amount of water that has already passed through.

My question is whether this would be sufficient or if adding another pump before the filtersock and/or skimmer to send water to the fuge would be a better idea? Also, would pods still be able to make it through the return pump to the DT?
(Gravity from the dt’s overflow would be a pain to implement since the fuge can only go on the opposite side from this.)

Again I really appreciate everyone’s time, I haven’t seen much about where to plumb the inputs and outputs of a remote fuge. Thanks and happy holidays!

Here’s a pic of my current setup when I first filled it up a few months ago. Fuge would be ~2ft up on the right.

 

[Retro Reefer]

I’m working on a 40 breeder now with a small refugium connected to it, I just run the overflow from the refugium into skimmer section of my sump without mechanical filtration and use separate small return pump in pump section of sump to return water to fuge.. as long as the DT and fudge are connected in some way pods should eventually find their way into main display.

 

[Reef-junky]

It will work fine if you feed the fuge off the return pump bleed. Some water will circulate around and some will go to the DT. Otherwise I have seen people Tee off the overflow. Not really a fan of this because a Tee is a good spot for a pipe to get plugged. You could also have the fuge first then the return and last the skimmer being feed off the bleed from the return pump.

 

[Fin]

I will have a remote refuge on my build. Like yours, it will be about 2' up and mine will be behind the display tank. I am planning on feeding water to it from an outlet on my manifold, which is run by a dedicated pump in my skimmer section. I installed a small Glass-Holes overflow in the refugium where water will exit and drain back to my sump.

 

[Rjukan]

I think you will be fine to take whichever is the easiest route in and out of your sump to the remote fuge. I dont think it matters where in the filter process it draws the water from, or returns it to, unless there are filter socks in the way.

I'm also in the planning stages of adding a tank to my system that would be considered a remote refugium, and I'm going to go about it a bit differently. I dont know if this would be an option for you, or if it's really worth the effort for either of us, but I just like the idea behind it... I'm going to mount the tank up on the wall above the water line of the DT so it's a gravity feed straight to the DT. This way pods have a easy ride, and it takes the pump out of the equation. Rather than use a manifold I'm just going to use a small pump to the remote tank so the flow is controllable without the use of valves and no impact on the sump and DT. Only real negative I can see will be the amount of water back to the sump in a power outage, but in my case I have a lot of space in the sump, yours might differ.

At any rate good luck with the addition, it will definitely be worth the time and effort to add to the overall volume of your system. Plus a remote fuge just looks cool.

 

[Vivid Creative Aquatics]

I've had a remote display fuge on my personal tank for years. Ive always had it drain back to the main system in the skimmer compartment. Despite that, pods always find a way back to the display tank.

For me, the bigger challenge was figuring out the best way to supply the fuge with the right amount of through put and flow. Originally I plumbed it with water directly from the display tank off one of the drains. The thinking was that nutrients that could fuel the fuge would more readely make it to the critters that could use it. It worked for while but, in my case, detritus started to build up and the fuge just became way to hard to maintain.

Next - I re-plumbed it off the manafold, after the return pump. That worked too, but didn't give me the flow I wanted through it without robbing flow from the other reactors and display tank.

Finally, I took it off the manafold and plumbed it with a small 500+ GPH DC pump placed in the skimmer compartment, feeding the single return of the 20 gallon fuge. The pump is right next to the filter socks, so it gets water that is still nutrient rich but not so full of detritus.

This photo is from the morning



This is right after i re-plumbed it the way it is setup now. You can see the drain that goes back the main sump. You can also see the return near the top-left side of the fuge in that back.

 

[JakeMonast]

I've had a remote display fuge on my personal tank for years. Ive always had it drain back to the main system in the skimmer compartment. Despite that, pods always find a way back to the display tank.

For me, the bigger challenge was figuring out the best way to supply the fuge with the right amount of through put and flow. Originally I plumbed it with water directly from the display tank off one of the drains. The thinking was that nutrients that could fuel the fuge would more readely make it to the critters that could use it. It worked for while but, in my case, detritus started to build up and the fuge just became way to hard to maintain.

Next - I re-plumbed it off the manafold, after the return pump. That worked too, but didn't give me the flow I wanted through it without robbing flow from the other reactors and display tank.

Finally, I took it off the manafold and plumbed it with a small 500+ GPH DC pump placed in the skimmer compartment, feeding the single return of the 20 gallon fuge. The pump is right next to the filter socks, so it gets water that is still nutrient rich but not so full of detritus.

This photo is from the morning



This is right after i re-plumbed it the way it is setup now. You can see the drain that goes back the main sump. You can also see the return near the top-left side of the fuge in that back.

Hey Vivid, I appreciate the input. I went to install the fuge today and after seeing your results with pulling from your drain pipe I decided that was definitely not something I’d like to deal with down the road. Fortunately my tank is rather new so I don’t have my pump running to any equipment but the display so for now it’s going to share the load with the fuge untill I can grab another pump. I have read recently that the fuge would benefit greatly from lower flow however? Is that simply due to the fact that yours is much larger than my 10g? I’d be interested to know your thoughts.

I think you will be fine to take whichever is the easiest route in and out of your sump to the remote fuge. I dont think it matters where in the filter process it draws the water from, or returns it to, unless there are filter socks in the way.

I'm also in the planning stages of adding a tank to my system that would be considered a remote refugium, and I'm going to go about it a bit differently. I dont know if this would be an option for you, or if it's really worth the effort for either of us, but I just like the idea behind it... I'm going to mount the tank up on the wall above the water line of the DT so it's a gravity feed straight to the DT. This way pods have a easy ride, and it takes the pump out of the equation. Rather than use a manifold I'm just going to use a small pump to the remote tank so the flow is controllable without the use of valves and no impact on the sump and DT. Only real negative I can see will be the amount of water back to the sump in a power outage, but in my case I have a lot of space in the sump, yours might differ.

At any rate good luck with the addition, it will definitely be worth the time and effort to add to the overall volume of your system. Plus a remote fuge just looks cool.

I thought this would be the best idea especially given that pods wouldn’t have to wrestle any impellers. Unfortunately I have no room to the left of my tank and on the right I only had space to set the fuge sideways untill I move my father’s beaten up arcade machine. This led me to other posts about a lifted fuge going straight to the DT but I’m not looking to find studs and drill only to have a quake or something extremely lame knock the tank down :/

 

[Vivid Creative Aquatics]

Hey Vivid, I appreciate the input. I went to install the fuge today and after seeing your results with pulling from your drain pipe I decided that was definitely not something I’d like to deal with down the road. Fortunately my tank is rather new so I don’t have my pump running to any equipment but the display so for now it’s going to share the load with the fuge untill I can grab another pump. I have read recently that the fuge would benefit greatly from lower flow however? Is that simply due to the fact that yours is much larger than my 10g? I’d be interested to know your thoughts.

In my opinion, you do want a more gentle flow than what you would likely want in your display tank, but not necessarily a low flow. For my 20 gallon fuge, I have a 500 GPH DC return pump cranked up to 100% feeding the tank. so I'm getting around 425 to 450 GPH to the fuge. that's about 20x turnover per hour. To keep it from just blowing things around, I added a single 1/2in RFG nozzle to the return. This spreads the flow out to fill the tank. So while the volume is high, it creates a flow that the pods can live in and not just get blown around.

Just a another quick point about pods traveling through the return system - I was doing some Sunday morning maintenance today and noticed a good number of pods and mysis shrimp in my BioPellet reactor. The reactor is fed off the manifold that is coming from the main return pump. So, if they had not made a stop in my reactor, their next stop would have been the display tank. LOL