The Aquarium Sump Set Up Video 101

Hello there, welcome back. In this video we're going to be taking a look at a sump. Two or three types of setups that could work for your situation. This is a very much reduced sized sump, so yours would probably be a little bit longer and maybe a little bit skinnier. This one is actually from a foot spa and it was given to me by Andy from Dramatic Aquatics many years ago for me to do a video on and I still haven't done a video. So Andy, this is the video that I wanted your sump for, finally. Now before we get into the basic layout of this particular setup, it might be worth just running through why a sump is of benefit to a tank. So firstly, All your stuff that would ordinarily be in the tank, like an internal filter, your intake and outtake, all of that sort of stuff, is outside the tank. Your pump is outside the tank, your heater is outside the tank, so you can keep your tank really tidy. There's no equipment in there, or very, very little equipment in there. It's all in here. Secondly, you can fit a nation of filter media and foams and whatever else it is you want to fit in here, in here. You can't really compare it to a canister filter because unless you've got something the size of the Eheim 2260, also known as the 1500XL, you're not going to get anywhere near as much filter media in a canister filter as you can in even a small sump like this one. Thirdly, everything is really accessible. You literally just access it from the top. So this would sit underneath your aquarium. You'd open your cabinet doors and you're straight into the sump. It's very convenient. And lastly, sumps are very customisable. You can basically build your filter to suit your tank situation. And your mate down the road might have a different situation and a totally different sump layout. With a canister filter or a internal filter, you're very much more limited to how you can lay them out. And they're also a little bit more difficult to clean. These are exceptionally easy to clean out and maintain. Now, although this is a very much shortened version of a sump, a normal sump will work exactly the same. Basically, your water comes in from the tank. Into this section here. In this scenario, it would go through coarse, medium and fine pads. Then it would go through some plastic balls. And to be honest, they're not very good at doing anything other than holding these up. That's pretty much all I've got those in there for. Although they will support some bacteria. All aerobic. I hope so. This might look strange because I'm actually filming this at the end. But when I was talking about those foams in the first section... I forgot to mention that they were just cut from pond foams. We got them on the FilterPro site, but you can get them anywhere online, certainly in the UK. Every aquatic store has these. They're just replaceable pond foams. They've got like an egg crate sort of a shape to them, which increases the contact surface area, which means they hold way more muck than flat foams. That's just a replacement. Fine pad for a pond filter as well. Just because it says pond filter doesn't mean to say you can't use it in an aquarium. It's exactly the same form. Just manufacturers cut them to size and charge you 10 times more for them. So that's what you need if you're replacing foam in any of your filters in your aquariums. So water comes in, then goes underneath the bottom. It goes up through filter media. I've got another course pad on here just to catch any scum that happens to get through, drops over here again, that's just to catch any scum or any remaining particles, goes through more media underneath, back up through more media and then it drops through to the pump chamber where the pump returns the water to the tank. And even though this particular sump's probably only, I don't know, 14 inches high, 16 inches wide by 16 inches deep maybe, The water does spend a hell of a lot of time in here because it goes down, up, down, up, and then down again. It will spend more time again in the media because this media is exceptionally porous. And because it's used in bags, well, I'll explain about the media later when we go into the media section. So that is one way of setting it up. Very basic, just using foams and filter media. That's pretty much it. Now another very useful option for this first section where the water comes in is something called filter socks. These are available in various lengths as you can see these ones go right down to the bottom and they're available in various widths as well they suit different size sumps and you can also get various types of these cradles which hold them you know. They are a very good option because they're so easy to maintain you literally just whip that out when it's clogged up and replace it with a fresh one. Clean your old one out and keep it for next time so you just swap them in and out in rotation as and when they get clogged up. They're available in different micron ratings, I think these ones Ones... God... may be 100 microns or 200 microns or somewhere in the middle of what's available. Mess about with them, find out which one works best for you. And in the area around the socks, you could always drop a little bit of filter floss just to catch any ridiculously fine muck that happens to get through there or spills over the top in the event of it becoming too clogged and you're not noticing that it needs cleaning out. That just catches the rest of the muck before it goes through your filter media. This is what we've currently got in the sump. There's 13 kilograms of this in there, believe it or not. Didn't look like it, but it holds a hell of a lot. And these are in little mesh bags of approximately 300 to 330 grams each. These are really easy to remove and inside of here, The flow gets slowed right down. Now if you've ever seen videos online mentioning anything like biosensors or anoxic filtration, that's basically what is happening inside of every piece of the biohome which you've seen in previous videos. But in this particular case where you've got a ridiculously porous media, in a situation where the water's actually becoming deoxygenated in the middle of this bag, You've got a real slow flow zone in the majority of this bag. And that absolutely pounds the nitrates. It's a very effective way to enable you to achieve a full cycle with less media than would ordinarily be needed because you're actually deoxygenating the water, not just inside the media, but also inside of this bag. So between the pieces of media is low oxygen conditions, or I suppose by the time you get to the middle, practically no oxygen. So every piece of every bit of media in that central core of this bag will be anaerobic, so you've got aerobic all around the outside and wherever the water is travelling down towards the middle and more or less in the middle of this, it's anaerobic. And of course inside the media is also anaerobic as well, so you've got a really effective way of doing things there. You'll have seen loads of people making like anoxic filtration using a similar method, but when you use a good media, it makes it a hell of a lot more efficient. So, these... cracking things and you can also put them in bigger bags as well for bigger sumps these work really really well there's actually a kilo in that one and you can imagine how much bacterial activity will be occurring in there it's unreal obviously you can put ceramic rings and so on in the sump I would advise not using these things though these are the Chinese versions the feel great you know the feel as if they've got really porous structure but they're Crap, you know, they're just... So soft. I'm not sure whether the camera will pick that up, but what initially looked like tunnels going all the way through it is actually just bubbles. You've got next to nothing happening in that, so just avoid that and avoid the bigger versions as well. Well... You might as well just put gravel or grapes or something in the filter as opposed to using this crap. Here we've got a nice little sump brick. I love the idea of these. Unfortunately they seem to have all the particles held together with some sort of resin. Which won't be very conducive to bacteria. And it actively repels the water as well, which doesn't bode well. But I like the idea of them. They're just really nice tactile things. And there's so many people making these now. Most of them like Chinese companies. companies. But I do like the idea of these. And some people say that they work. I cannot remember which company this is. But that's the logo for them. It wasn't magtech or magpul, I think they've got something to do with rifle scopes or something. I can't remember, it was mag something or other. And I did feature this a while back in the sump brick video, which never really had a conclusion. But I'll show you another one of the bricks that I featured in that video as well. It didn't last very well. Here we've got a bigger version of the Chinese stuff. Now here we've got something which I got really excited about when somebody told me about it. This is a block of pumice and on the face of it, it's quite hard, it looks very very porous but unfortunately all those things that look like tunnels Oh it just bubbles. You slice through it and it opens it up and it looks like it's going to hold loads of water but when you put it into water it doesn't draw it up at all, it floats, it will not sink and really the only available surface area is what you can see on the outside. So that was a real bummer. And these are actually sold for cleaning barbecues. The idea being that you rub the grill and it wears its way into here and it grinds all of the carbon off and everything you know. So this one showed real promise, unfortunately the structure of it just isn't right. However, pumice that is a little bit better is the likes of that. That's the Sofar Cell on the Filter Pro site, that's 15 to 25 mil white pumice. And this one is very similar, it's actually a lower grade though. Put bits of grey hard rock in and that one will be sold as... You know the, you know the thing! It's basically just a fair to low grade of pumice. In the bags, you maybe can't notice much difference, but the whiter it is, the more porous it tends to be. Of course, you've got red pumice as well, also known as, well, it's not pumice, red volcanic rock or black volcanic rock, which would be scoria. It's pretty good, has big tunnels going through it. Most of it's aerobic, though. It just hasn't got the variability of a good filter media. If you're going to go with pumice of any type, go with the white one, although if you use a lot of it in a sump, it can raise the pH, because the better quality the pumice is, the higher the specific pH. This stuff we do is approximately pH of 8, making it perfect for goldfish, live bearers, Malawis, and also marine as well. What's that one? Now, these are from the BioHome range. This is BioHome Ultra. Maxi Ultimate and Maxi Ultimate Marine. This one hasn't got any added trace elements fused into the structure. It's basically just a big pellet of exceptionally porous media. Now you may have seen me feature this one in previous videos where we dip this into a blue solution and it goes Sucks it up, it's exceptionally porous, it's a sand-based media. It basically replicates a deep sand bed in a very safe environment. Very porous, aerobic action on the outside, anaerobic action on the inside. So that's the one without the trace elements, by Home Ultra. This one has got added trace elements which are very good for bacteria, fresh water bacteria, to use as catalysts for the bacterial processes. They're fused into the structure, they're not there to condition the water in any way. This one works in exactly the same way. Basically the same structure but with added trace elements to suit different types of bacteria and the last one is a marine version of that particular media. That's Maxi Marine. That one's got all sorts of marine bacteria specific trace elements used into the structure to act as catalysts for them. Just allows it to set up really really fast compared to you know quote-unquote ordinary media. Although this one, when it is set up, will work just as hard as them. Trace elements do build up naturally in media, just from your water or your fish waste or, you know, any sort of processes going on, so given time, I'm not sure how much time, this one will contain trace elements. They'll be kind of locked up in here, they'll have managed to get their way into here, and the bacteria will use those. These ones have it in from day one. Also in the bi-home range we've got something that you guys in the US might know as super gravel, in the UK I just call it shower media, must be used in koi filters, it's a very hard sintered glass media, this one has actually got quite a dense sort of a core to it, so as the water is crashing over it in a shower filter it'll still support anaerobic activity because the transit of water through here is extremely slow. That is another option. I know you guys in the US use quite a lot of that. Here we've got something called alpha grog. Now that's very similar to a natural lava rock, but this is actually a manufactured rock or filter media from ceramic stuff. Very, very knobbly. Works exceptionally well in muck. Great for traditional koi filters where this is just sitting in filth. Works pretty good in a sump as well, but since the vast majority of the surface area is external, it's mostly aerobic activity that you're going to be getting here. So ammonia and nitrite reduction, no problem at all. Nitrate reduction, unless this is packed into a bag really tight or left to get hellish filthy, you're not going to see much nitrate reduction from something like that. But it is hellish cheap. If you want to fill spare space so cheaply in your sump, Go for Alpha Grog, it's great. Now, this stuff from Eheim is called Substrat Pro. This would be the nearest thing available to the bio gravel. It's a good media. So if you can put this in mesh bags, it will have a similar effect. It's a similar price as well. There's not much price difference between it. So that is a very, very good media. And for you guys who can't get bio home in your particular country, that would be a great alternative. In the same way that we've used the Bio Gravel in the mesh bags, just use the Substrat Pro. Very good stuff. And the last two things to show you are sump bricks. Again, we saw this one in the sump brick test video that never really had a conclusion. This is the one that's manufactured from the Biohome material. It's actually exactly the same material as is used in the one I just showed you, which is the Biohome Ultra, but it's made into a brick form. It's got these little holes here so you can put your little mushroomy things and you can grow corals and so on out of here. Very porous. It weighs about 1.2 kilos. I mean, I mean, that is just a self-contained deep sand bed operating in a really safe environment. And that is the actual brick that I had in that sump brick video. As you can see, it still looks as good as new. Still as hard as nails. This one, however, did not fare so well. I left these in and I let the water evaporate and you can probably just see the remnants of it but this one actually grew a massive white afro. It looks really weird and when I brought it outside a lot of it just blew off. It seemed to draw up, I don't know what the hell it did, it seemed to draw the water up it and where it was evaporating from on the top, as I say, it had like a big afro on the top and you can just brush that off. I don't know, it just Whatever the afro was, just made the brick start to disintegrate, so that one didn't go too well, but it's an option. I won't say what the manufacturer is of this, because, you know, it could be a faulty one. I know there was allegedly some faulty ones out a few years ago, but it didn't do very well at all. I mean, look at all the dust and crap coming off there. That's all just stuff that settled on it as the water evaporated. It's, er, no. It's a type of media called K1. Here we've got the standard size. Here we've got the K1 micro. And these are often used in a sump chamber as a moving bed. A moving bed is very good at stripping out the ammonia and nitrite because it's a very aerobic situation. The bits of media get bashed together. They really support a vigorous aerobic bacteria. But moving beds tend to be a little bit noisy and you can still get good ammonia and nitrite reduction from decent quality ordinary filter media which we've just taken a look at. A moving bed using these can take six months to establish with bacteria because it's such a hostile environment for bacteria. It's a plastic media, bacteria does not like to grow on plastic so it takes ages to set up. It can be noisy, it may look beautiful But really in a sump you can put much better filter media in than this. It's a fairly fruitless exercise you know. Looks great when you open it up you can explain what's happening in that particular part of the sump but personally I'd say don't bother. But if you do bother add a few of those in. They're gel filter balls. They're from the same manufacturer as the K1 and K1 Micro. These are great, I give them away with all of the fresh water media that we sell, and you basically just scatter these on top of your media. In the presence of ammonia and nitrite, these will slowly dissolve and they will help to seed the filter media in a very natural way. They are excellent. Now I could go on for days showing you like every different possible type of media that can be used in a sump. You know what's out there, these are just some of them, you know, some of them are good, some of them not so good, some support aerobic activity only, some support aerobic and anaerobic, and others, the likes of that, if they're used in that specific situation, will support a hell of a lot more anaerobic than aerobic, and as I said before, you can customise this to get whatever result you want from this sump. We'll just touch on the chemical filtration side of things. Ordinarily, the order of things would be mechanical, to make the water clean, biological, to make the water healthy, and then chemical, to sort out anything that the previous two stages didn't sort out. So if you had bog wood or peat or something that would stain the water, you could put carbon in, it would draw in that colour. Avoid using anything that's recharged with bleach, because bleach is just lethal. Terrible for anything living. Just go with carbon activated charcoal if you've got any sort of water clarity problems as far as the staining goes or if you want to draw in any residual fish treatments. If you're going on holiday and you've got people feeding your fish and you know for a fact they're going to put far too much food in the tank, you could use something like that from RP Aquatics. That is ammonia block. It's not actually a block, but it blocks the ammonia. And that would go after your biological side of things. So your biological part would still have available ammonia. Whatever got through there would get drawn in by this. These are exceptionally effective. They're actually recommended to be used whilst you're setting up a tank. It enables you to stock it faster. And when it's finished, you just chuck it away. By then, your biological side of things can take over. And then you don't need this anymore. Unless you're going on holiday. They also do a nitrate remover as well so you could stick one of these in until your filter got really established and then just throw it away and I love the idea that Dave who sent me these regards these as a temporary measure. Don't really want to be using things you've got to replace every month or every two months or every three months. These are to be used either when you go on holiday or when you're setting the filter up to enable you to stock it faster. And then get rid of them. If your filter is set up properly and it's big enough, it can take over. So that's the mechanical, the biological explain. We've gone through a little bit of the chemical. What else? Other stuff. Right, so that is our end chamber. Presently, we've only got the pump. That sits in the bottom. A pipe attaches to there and goes back to your tank. And if you've got a tropical tank, this last section would be where the heater goes. And that would just stick on the side of the tank, near the bottom, or if you had a bigger chamber which was much deeper, you could stand it vertically or put it at a 45 degree angle. As long as it's up off the bottom, the water can circulate freely around it, and that will heat the water, and then it'll pump it back to the tank. That will maintain the water temperature. Now we've got another sort of heater here which is much smaller so we've got the electronics in the middle the element goes around it that is very compact it wouldn't take up much space in a little sump so in this particular situation you might just want to sit it on the side there just like that. Now something else you might want to add into that last section of the sump is a protein skimmer this is a hang on the side one see we've got a little hook here So this draws water in, it also draws air in as well, through here, thrashes them all up in the pump, foam results, rises up here, into here, which is like a fractionation chamber, collects in this little collection bucket. Then you can remove the foam and just, you know, clean it as and when it gets mucky. Because of the compact nature of this, it'll go pretty much anywhere but we'll just sit them in here, like that. Now we're properly tooled up in this last section. Now the beauty of using the protein skimmer in that last section is that it will reduce the protein that's in the water. The protein comes from the fish food, which tends to be very high in protein, and anything the fish eats that it can't digest. Protein thickens the surface layer of the water, also known as the meniscus, and if And if that surface layer gets too thick, You tend to get a lot of foam on the top of your tank where the water gets poured back in you it could actually cover the whole of the top of the tank certainly seen a lot of koi ponds which have too much protein the top of it's just covered with foam you know you think you'd put washing up liquid or something in there that can happen with tanks especially if you've got things like piranhas or something the top layer is just It's awful, generally, if you cannot get rid of that protein and scum and oils and so on from the food they're eating. That protein skimmer does the job. That's important because you need gaseous exchange. The water is constantly trying to exchange gas between itself and the atmosphere. So the thinner that surface layer is, the better that exchange is and the healthier the fish are. the more easily the toxins are put out into the atmosphere and when you've got something that is as sensitive as a marine system having a protein skimmer is pretty much essential. Okay so that's a pretty basic rundown of sumps, what you can put in them and how they work. I'm sure there'll be much better videos than mine online but I've just tried to put all the basics into one video. If you've liked what you've seen and you want to find out more about the various components that we've shown here, just check out the video description. I will list all of them if I can find them. Check out my other videos. Give them a thumbs up if you want. If you're not subscribed, you might want to subscribe if you want to see more videos like this or related videos. Check out the recommended channels on my page because those guys generally do a better job of making videos than me and they upload more regularly so you know they are ones I would definitely recommend. Nothing more to say really. I'll see you next time, thanks for watching.