Bare with me here for the description, which will be poor. I need to see if all of you think that this will work. There
is going to be a crappy paint pic at the end.
I am putting together a 'custom' tank. The overall dimensions are 48"Lx12"Dx12"H. Before you say anything, yes I am aware of just how shallow and narrow that will be, and it is one of the reasons I wanted to go with custom dimensions. I am also aware that the nice round numbers I have right now for various measures, such as wall lengths, will be more like 3.75" instead of 4", and so on. The tank itself will be rimless made from plate glass. All inner walls will be acrylic or similar safe materials. There is going to be a full-height overflow wall dead in the center of the tank, cutting it into two ~15 gallon halves. One will be left totally intact and that will be the main tank area.
The other half is going to be a 'show fuge'. I love the look of the planted refugiums and my goal is to make a clean, good looking refugium in the second half of the tank. I already know my skimmer and pump dimensions, the Tunze Nano 9002 and Eheim 1250 (feel free to comment on both).
The overflow vents will be 3"x2", may need to be adjusted once we are actually siliconing things in and know exactly what we are working with, and they will be in the back right corner of the main tank. From there, the water filters through a section that starts as 4" wide and gets wedged down to 2" channel over 6" of length. That channel, from the filter media in 'chamber 1' to the skimmer will be 14". There will be two drip plates, akin to the set-up in a Solana for those familiar with it, spaced 4" apart, for filter floss and any additional media. The short, non-slanting wall that you will see in the picture is 2" in length. From there, it will go through a series of baffles into the area where the heater will be, before it goes through one more smaller baffle into the skimmer's area, which is a 4"Lx6"D footprint.
The skimmer is boxed in with full-height walls, with the exception of the baffle coming in from the overflow channel, and one of the walls is an overflow that will have the same vent sizes as the first overflow (coming in from the main tank). This next area is the main refugium area. Its footprint is 18"Lx10"D, with the exception of a 4"x4" cut in the back right corner that is part of the skimmer's area. The left wall is an overflow wall, which will have vents along the entire length of it (not certain if that needs to be cut down or not) where water feeds into the return section. The footprint on that is a little wierd, as you will see in the paint diagram. The footprint is a 6"Lx8"D on the side closest to the main tank, and 10"D on the side closest to the refugium.
I was planning to make the baffles 10" in height and set two inches apart (is this too wide between them?). Right after the drip plates in the first chamber, the water will go down-up-down through the baffles. The second set copies the height and separation, but the water goes up, then down into the skimmer chamber. All overflow vents will be a quarter of an inch in width.
Assume, for the time being, that all lighting will be suspended above the tank. The main tank
will have a lid, being as shallow as it is. I am thinking of a custom one similar to this, taken from a fellow Solana user on Nano-Reefs:
It's made of screening and other materials available from an HD or Lowe's garden section. I am not using the little supports that hold the lid on my Solana, so I will just use those for this tank.
Here is the poor diagram. I do have it drawn out on graph paper so it is drawn to proper proportions on there for us. I can scan it if necessary. There is a wall that cannot be seen on the skimmer area, that should be on the left where the little 4" is just floating.
So, what does everyone think? Questions, comments, concerns? Let me know, thanks!
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