We love fancy sumps as much as the next reefer, especially ones which are well engineered to really improve the filtration performance and the user experience of powering a reef tank. Unfortunately most designer sumps usually incorporate a ton of bells and whistles to increase the perception that they are somehow doing more, but most of them are simply more expensive without really improving anything.
That’s why we reached for the new Aqueon 60 Breeder to use a sump for our 400 gallon Hardline Reef, and the 200 gallon Fat Cube is powered by a simple 40 gallon breeder aquarium. Baffles and chambers were mandatory when our protein skimmers and drains spit out tons of microbubbles that are unsightly inside the display tank but modern skimmers don’t spit out nearly as many bubbles as they used to, if at all.
Sure a baffle is nice to maintain a constant water level for your skimmer section, but if you use a float valve like we do the water level of the entire sump will remain constant. And if you want to use a refugium and or an algae scrubber it’s nice to have separate sections for them, but if you know you won’t be needing them, you can’t do much better than a wide open tank as a sump like our 60 and 40 gallon breeder tanks.
The affordability, availability and functionality of breeder tanks can’t be overlooked for use as a sump and we simply love the flexibility of having a wide open aquarium as a central filtration chamber, giving us plenty of room to install a ClariSea filter roll, a return pump on the opposite end, and lots of elbow room to fire up the new Maxspect Jump SK-800 protein skimmer.
Better yet, now that we have the 15 year old Fat Cube aquarium running and flowing with fresh seawater we can finally relocate all the original inhabitants from the makeshift saltwater pond we’ve been keeping them in. After moving the tank, breaking the original stand, building a new stand and polishing the acrylic aquarium, it’s been a long four month road to getting this teenage aquarium up and running again so stay tuned as the next installment will be the best part of reef keeping, aquascaping the reefscape, placing the corals and finally seeing these cool lightly used, veteran aquarium fish in a display tank.
