I’m planning to do a DIY sump with a 20g long for my 65g DT. I wanted to ask opinions on what you guys feel is a must have to be built into the sump? Based off what I’ve read and watched it looks like I should have at minimum 4 baffles but I’m not sure. Do you have a favorite build? Any recommendations or suggestions are much appreciated
Arguably the most important thing to remember is that there needs to be enough available volume to hold all the water that will flow into the sump when the return pump turns off (e.g. power outage or simply a failing pump).
This is my current layout (roughly):
The water comes down from the tank and flows into no. 1 where it passes through filter socks. Then it goes into no. 2, where I have my skimmer and filter reactors as well as some rocks. no. 3 is for macro algae and even more rocks. The gray area between no. 3 and no. 4 is a bubble trap and 4 is the return pump chamber. You can swap 3 and 2 if you don't have a way to keep the macro algae from getting into the bubble trap, but I like having it behind the skimmer as it collects less detritus this way.
I don't know if you can fit all this in 20 gal, though. You will most likely have to create a single row with only 2 or 3 parts.
