Hey guys I am looking building my own All in one tank. I plan on using a 33 gallon long tank that is 48" by 12" and 13" high.

My plan is to have my Overflow on one side the tank with a compartment for Skimmer Refugium and return section. Every section is all set up with in an L shape.

I want the have the water flow over the overflow in to the skimmer chamber. The Skimmer I plan on using is the Aquatic Life Internal Mini Protein Skimmer 115.

From there it will run through a bubble trap to the return section.

From the return section the Maxijet 1200 pump will pump the water up a tube and I will have a T with one side going to my Refugium on this side.

I will have a ball valve and have this about 33% open so that about 66% is going to the other part of the T which will return to the tank.

I am not sure if I want my refugium to be like an inch off the bottom of the tank and have a return pipe inside there which would return in to the Return section or if I will have the refugium just have an over flow into the Return section.

My plans are to have 2-4 Koralia pumps inside the tank.

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I would love for peoples opinions I attached pictures of my plans in a picture.
Any questions I will ask to the best I can.

Bump....

ANyone have any opinions?

In general, I really like your design. It makes good use of an overly long tank, and maximizes the area viewable from the front.
It looks like it will be easy for water to loop through the refugium, into the pump, and then back in to the refugium, resulting in less nutrient rich water in the refugium, and more nutrient rich water in the tank, which will reduce the effectiveness of the refugium. Could you swap the positions of the refugium and the return pump so that flow went:
Tank => Skimmer =>--33%->Refugium => Return pump => Tank...
Tank => Skimmer =>--66%->--->---=> Return pump => Tank...

Another thing: will the open standpipe overflow from the refugium, in your current design, be noisy? If so, you may want to replace it with a curved one (I forget what they are called).

Looks cool on the whole.
I would think it would be better to have water go through the refugium before the skimmer, otherwised the skimmer will have removed the nutrients before they get to the plants that need them.

The goal of the refugium isn't to grow plants, it's to wring as many nutrients out of the water as possible. If the plants have fewer nutrients because the skimmer already removed most of them - great! You want the plants to be near starvation, so that they will exhaust their food supply as much as possible. The plants will live off of whatever the skimmer misses, and if that means they grow slower, you'll just have to trim them less often (easier maintenance). The skimmer and the refugium are doing very similar jobs (removing nutrients), but I would guess that the skimmer is better at making dirty water mostly clean, while the plants are better at making mostly clean water even cleaner. I haven't researched this, but that is what I would expect to discover.

I love your idea, Dont forget the pics.
Anybody else have thoughts about a media chamber? I use a hob AC 50.
Also does this 115 skimmer have a overflow tube?
Just thought I would throw that out there for ya JRBEAR. LOL
Ill keep up on this overthere. LOL

did this build ever happen?

The OP was last active July 2010. Good luck getting an answer from him/her..