I have been searching on the net and also reading about setups of sumps and all and trying to process all the information but I am running into some difficulties understanding and I am hoping that I might be able to get some help. First of all let me start by saying that after reading a post from blockclimber in the Pico forum I began to think that maybe I have gotten in over my head with a Picotope for my first aquarium. So after so thoughts about water volume and such I thought maybe the best way to give myself a fighting chance being a newbie to SW would be to add a sump setup to my picotope. I don't want to go too huge with the sump setup, I have a spare 5 gal aga sitting around that I figured I could partition off and use. I do plan on drilling or having someone drill my picotope as an external overflow makes me nervous and I believe I would loose a lot of room with it.

So now comes all of the questions that I have. First off would be do you think I should drill a center overflow or try to locate in one of the corners? How big off bulk head do you all think I should drill for? What size pump do you all think would be good for the return? I don't plan on having too much overhead, maybe at most 3 feet I am thinking with plumbing bends and all. I do plan on having a 3 chamber sump first chamber of course holding the filter floss/chemical filtration, center being setup as a fuge and last chamber housing the heater, pump and float.

Any input you all could give would be appreciated as I would like to make sure I don't screw this up. And also don't want to get discouraged at my first round with SW because I jumped into the tight space of a Pico, but the size of our apartment dictated this decision. Thanks in advance all.