Oh my goodness.
We're finally to episode nine of saltwater aquariums demystified plumbing
refugiums and some stick around till the end because we're going to do an update
on the innovative Marine Encore build the good and the bad.
We're going to start off with refugiums. Literally a refugium is just a refuge.
I mean it could be a refuge for anything for your fish, for your pods,
for your algae, but typically in the saltwater aquarium hobby,
when we're talking about a refugium,
we're talking about a refugium for amphipod copepods or for macro algae to help
control your nitrates and your phosphates.
There are really two types of refugiums.
The first is a hang on the back refugium and the second is a refugium in your
sump.
There are different ways of setting up a refugium depending on what exactly the
purpose of your refugium is.
Let's say we're setting up a refugium for a macro algae.
All we really need is the macro algae,
low flow and some sort of light,
but let's say we're going to set up the refugium mainly for amphipods and Copa
pods and then we need to add places for them to live so we could still put in
the macro algae. We might put in a Sandy substrate, we might put a miracle mud.
We might put in live rock. There are specialized products called pod hotels.
We're just going to basically try to give the pods a place to live.
How you set up your refugium really depends on your bill.
Let's say that you're just going to do a hang on the back refuge,
something like like this from Aqua max.
This thing is a beast and it's super simple.
All you have to do is you add your macro algae back here,
you put a light on the back.
This doesn't just have to be a refugium for your macro algae.
You could also put other media in here. You could put pod hotels,
you could put ceramic media, you could put miracle mud, you can put sand,
you can put rubble rock and really make a spot for your copepods and amphipods.
If you have a big enough system and you have a sump,
you can also do the exact same thing in a sub compartment.
Typically a refugium is set up in a separate compartment and you usually want to
do it after the protein skimmer because if you do it before the protein skimmer
and let's say your growing amphipods and Copa pods,
they might just get sucked up and skimmed out by your protein skimmer.
For lights, I really like the Fenix light,
but if you go to Marine depot.com there are many other options for you.
Number two we're going to talk about is plumbing.
Plumbing is super confusing unless your a plumber.
I am, I'm not a plumber,
but I have watched enough YouTube videos to be able to plumb my 120 gallon tank,
so we're going to start at the top and work our way down.
This is not meant to teach you how to do the plumbing,
but to give you an overview of the terms so you can decide what sort of plumbing
you want and then go do your own research.
The first thing we need to talk about with plumbing are overflows.
There has to be some way for your water to go from your display tank down to
your sump and we call that an overflow.
There's all sorts of different overflows you can get,
but primarily you have an internal overflow, like in my 120 gallon,
it takes up a little bit of space in your display tank, but it's really common.
Or you can do an external overflow where there's a really minimal low profile
section in your tank and the majority of the plumbing is outside of the tech.
Now in your overflow box,
you're going to have anywhere from one pipe to three pipes depending on your
filtration method, which we'll talk about in a second.
When we're talking about overflows,
there's a couple of terms hobbyists use that might be really confusing.
One is a whir and a whir is basically the damn like portion.
So in my 120 gallon right behind me,
the whir is the part you see inside of the tank and it's what separates the
display tank from the overflow. And then there's also surface skimming.
If you've ever had a fresh water tank that doesn't have a surface skimmer,
you'll notice a lot of proteins and organic matter can settle at the top.
So in the saltwater hobby,
we pretty much do all of our filtration by surface skimming,
meaning the surface of the water cascades over into the overflow.
So your surface stays clean. Overflow styles,
I mean the most simple style is to have a single pipe.
Pros and cons of that one is really, really easy, but two, if it gets clogged,
there's nothing you can do about it.
And you might come home to a floor full of salt water and not only that,
but a single pipe is really difficult to regulate.
So you might hear a lot of suction noises, which can be super annoying.
You can also have a primary overflow and an emergency overflow.
I personally only run systems with an emergency overflow because I'm a little
paranoid and I've already spilled, I don't know,
20 gallons of water on my floor in the bass,
so I'm always super careful to make sure I have an emergency overflow. Okay.
The first main method is called the Durso standpipe method.
A Durso standpipe uses basically a single pipe and it has this little U shape on
the top. The Durso stand pipe works really well,
especially in smaller tanks cause you only need one single drain.
Obviously a downside is if it gets clogged,
you're going to have an overflow problem with saltwater.
The second type of overflow is the one that I always seem to use and it is
called the Herbie method and the Herbie method uses a primary overflow and
emergency overflow and then obviously you need a return.
So with the Herbie method you need three pipes.
The primary overflow is in the back of your whir and it is a low pipe and in
your sump area you connect it to either a gate valve or a ball valve so you can
control the rate of flow.
And that's really important because without controlling the rate of flow,
you will hear loud sucking noises.
The point of a Herbie style is you want to keep the water level just above your
primary overflow, but below your emergency overflow,
which creates an essence, a silent overflows system.
Then you have a bean animal style. I have no idea where that name came from.
I didn't do any research or looking at it,
but basically a bean animal combines both the Durso standpipe and the Herbie
method. Don't worry if you're super confused. Most beginners,
if you're going to purchase a system with a sump,
you're going to get some sort of all in one system that comes with a sump and
the plumbing included.
That way you just got to follow the directions and your plumbing set up in the
future. If you want to venture into some sort of DIY hard plumbing system,
then you can do a lot more research to really narrow in on what method of
overflow is best for you.
When we're talking about plumbing for your salt water aquarium,
we're really talking about two methods.
You have soft plumbing and harder plumbing,
and let's jump in with the easiest first, which is soft plumbing.
The benefits of soft plumbing are it's way cheaper,
it's way easier to set up and you don't need any sort of glues,
epoxies or cements. You just need a plastic hose,
clamp and flexible tubing. There's various kinds of soft plumbing out there,
but really soft plumbing is any sort of plumbing that relies on flexible tubing.
There really are four types of flexible tubing.
You have braided vinyl silicone and reverse osmosis tubing.
So how do you connect your flexible tubing? Well,
there are really two ways to do it.
The most common way is just using a Barb fitting. For example,
almost all of the return pumps you're going to get for your CISM will come with
a barbed end and then you just push the flexible tubing onto the Barb and and
secure it with a plastic hose clamp. But there are also push fittings.
You'll find push fittings,
especially common in your rod eye filters and also in reactors and these work by
just taking the flexible tuning and pushing it into the push fitting.
The only real considerations with flexible tubing are cost. For example,
vinyl tubing's going to be a lot cheaper than silicone tubing and also the
diameter.
You just got to make sure you get the right size flexible tubing and by two or
three times more than you think you need.
That way if you make a mistake or you don't cut it quite the right size,
they'll have extra,
you can pick up all the flexible tubing you need at Marine Depot or you can just
go to your local hardware store and they should have tons of options as well.
Okay. Let's do a quick overview of hard plumbing.
Hard plumbing is anything that uses PVC,
so when we're talking PVC you have schedule 40 and schedule 80 and that just has
to do with the thickness of the PVC itself.
Schedule 40 is your standard PVC and it will work perfectly fine for your
saltwater aquarium set up.
The only downside of schedule 40 is it comes in white and white.
Usually it doesn't look quite as nice as the gray schedule.
80 is definitely thicker.
It's definitely meant for high pressure applications and I typically use
schedule 80 just because I liked the color so much more,
but thankfully now you can purchase schedule 40 in different colors.
For example, in my SCA 120 system,
I was able to purchase schedule 40 blue PVC and then I just used schedule 80
fittings, which are great so it looks really slick.
How do you connect your hard plumbing? You have to use cement.
You use the primer, you use the cement,
you push and hold the pieces together for 30 seconds and they're pretty much
set.
The only trick is here is most primer is purple because that's what the building
code demands, but you can get a clear primer,
which I highly recommend because if you spend all this money on having a
beautiful hard plum system and then you just have purple edges around all of
your fittings, it doesn't look great. Bulkheads.
I can't tell you how confused I was about bulkheads.
You know I w w when I first started the hobby, people talking about bogans.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
The only reference I had for bulkheads was like the Titanic.
The Titanic had all these bulkheads,
which were supposed to be these watertight seals and it was supposed to be
unsinkable. But if, I forget how many it was,
but like two of the bulkheads were damaged, so the Titanic sank.
So what's a bulkhead?
A bulkhead is typically made out of a different material called abs. It's very,
very similar to PVC,
but a bulkhead goes in between the dry portion and the wet portion of your tank
and creates a watertight seal to control the flow in your tank.
There are all sorts of different valves. There's ball valves,
gate valves, float valves, check valves,
and true union ball valves.
And then of course there are a ton of different types of fittings out there.
There's unions, elbows, teas, couplers,
bushings, and PVC to hose barbs. There's also more out there,
but those are just some of the basic ones that if you start to heart pump
system,
you're going to have to think about because you're going to have to utilize them
when putting together your hard plumbing
[inaudible].
If you just type in sump in the internet,
you're basically going to come up with some sort of a basement sump pump system
in the salt water aquarium.
Hobby assump is typically a separate aquarium that's housed directly your
display tank. Uh, some has several benefits and comes in different materials.
You can get a glass sump or an acrylic sump and a sump does a lot of things.
Assump increases the overall water volume of your tank,
which really stabilize the things out.
It's a great place to hide all of your gear so you don't have to stare at your
heaters and your skimmers and your reactors.
It also allows you to do a lot of different types of filtration because of all
the gear you can put inside of it. Not only that,
assump often has a compartment for a refugium or for auto top off reservoir.
So it really is like an all in one filtration system that makes your display
tank beautiful and not gunked up with all of the gear.
Let's talk about the Marine Depot elite [inaudible].
That's the one we're going to feature. Here is the one right back here.
Buying an acrylic sump is expensive and I went a long time just using a glass 20
gallon aquarium with some baffles I put in there,
but when I finally paid the money to get an acrylic sump it was 100% worth it
and I will never go back. The Marine Depot 30 inch sump by trigger sentence.
By the way, if you don't know,
trigger systems is a huge name in sumps and they make probably the top of the
line sumps out there. The MD 30 inch elite some it's American made,
it's acrylic. It comes with a seven inch filter sock, a drip plate.
It has two time one inch drain pipes.
It comes with five a quarter inch quick disconnects which is perfect for your
auto top off reservoir for two-part dosing and other things.
It has four pro polars of different sizes.
It has an adjustable baffle to control the water height in the sump compartment
from seven inches to nine and a half inches.
It has a separate compartment that can either be utilized for an auto top off or
reservoir or for refugium it comes with a heater holder,
two cable organizers and a bubble chamber with dual filter media levels.
So not only will it reduce the bubbles from your protein skimmer,
but you can also put media in there as well.
Now every summer is going to be designed a little bit differently,
but they will all share the basic stages depending on the size,
a larger size,
some will have larger compartments and also probably more compartments,
but let's just break down what they are.
The first stage is your drain silencing chamber.
This is where the water first stops when it comes down from your display tank,
and the point of this is to give the water a place to enter your sump quietly
and reduce some of the bubbles.
The next chamber is typically where you put your filter socks.
After the filter sock compartment, the water goes into your primary compartment,
which is typically where you put a protein skimmer,
but it's also big enough to house other pieces of equipment such as reactors
from the skimmer reactor chamber.
It goes into the bubble trap slash media chamber, a bubble trap.
Basically the amount of bubbles that are transferred into your display tank from
your bubble trap media container, it goes into the return chamber.
This is typically where you put your return pump and the final chamber,
which is actually after the return chamber, is a configurable chamber.
You can either use this as a three and a half gallon auto top off a reservoir,
or you can put a refugium in there. If you do make it into a refugium,
you will need to tee off your drain line so that some of the water goes to the
first chamber of your sump and the rest of it goes into the configurable
chamber. Again, links to everything in the description below.
If you would prefer reading more detail about episode nine,
just click on blog below. That'll take you to my first fish tank.
[inaudible].
All right time for the bonus innovative Marine update,
so if you go all the way back to episode one we introduced the build we were
going to use for this series and it's the innovative Marine nouveau Encore pro
bundle sold through Marine Depot.
It's an all-in-one rear filtration system, low iron glass,
and it's actually two independent 10 gallon tanks with their own filtration
side-by-side. You could do a hospital tank and a display tank,
a hospital tank and a quarantine tank, two displays, saltwater, freshwater,
whatever you want.
We decided to do one side salt water and one side freshwater. Overall,
I couldn't be happier with the build.
I actually have it in my bedroom and it looks fantastic. First up,
the equipment we chose ended up working really, really well.
It's pretty much a good mixture of high quality while also affordable.
The tank itself is gorgeous. The low iron glass looks awesome and high.
I love having a freshwater and a saltwater side next to each other.
The light spectrums that come down from both of them looks super cool and I love
the fact that they're both so different from each other. Now, the bad,
the bad really has to do with the saltwater side. Everything was set up,
it was cycled, and we went to our local fish store and we bought some fish.
Now typically I quarantined my fish. I have my large quarantine tank back here,
but because it was a brand new setup,
I used the innovative Marine tank as the quarantine tank. Well,
what happened is I put the clown fish in and I think I had a dark fish as well.
Two or three days go by and they are covered in spots.
I don't think it was Eric. I think it was Brooklyn Nella. They died.
There was nothing I could do. I tried to treat them.
So now we run into this problem where we know there is [inaudible] or velvet or
Brooke Anella in the system. So now we have a 72 day waiting period. Well,
that's it for episode nine. Coming up next week,
the final installment in salt water aquariums demystified episode 10
maintenance. If you haven't already, please subscribe, follow.
We'll see you next week and half of your evening.
[inaudible].