DIY ref for nao tank?

[Virus]

Hi currently i'm having a nano tank 1.5 ft around 15G and i was thinking of having a ref to you know.. house algae and perhaps grow some pods in there for my mandarin.

I've considered the I-ref thing but found to be unsuitable coz of my small tank.. support ain't good enough.

This is the area i've got i'm thinking to make use. Need to shift those items away to my cabinet..

Thought for days but idea of 2 pump is definetely not good and dangerous. Other than that may need a custom one but not sure how the design would be like for this kind of setup and how the flow would be going coz it's by the side rather than below and there's no holes in the main to flow water in there...so seeking help here...

I know it's a small tank but i take pride in it and i love nano.

[arcanehacker]

may I know whats an I-ref? any pic..

[arcanehacker]

oh.. ok.. saw it.. inform us if you are successful.. I would need one for my 1 feet tank too.. hehe..

[lightningstrike]

hi virus,

i m oredi in the process of setting up a ref for my tank. using a 1ft x 1ft x 1ft tank as a ref wif 5" sandbed. thought of ur idea of 2 pumps b4........ indeed it is dangerous. so in the end, i did a siphon pipe for downwards gravity flow into my ref and a pump in my ref to pump up the water. the main problem i encountered was that the water coming down does not synchronizes wif the water that is being pumped up. taking into consideration that i m using a variable submersible pump and hving a check valve installed on the siphon pipe to limit the flow.

there is no way u can synchronize both the flowrate till it is the same. if u cant synchronize them, this means either one of ur tank or ref will flood.

then i thought of another idea which was to limit the downward flow by using a float valve on the ref via siphon pipe. but this time round, after installing everything, i discovered that everything works, except for the fact that the downward flow is so much slower now that the flowrate of the water from the pump going up to the tank is so much faster than the flowrate coming down to the ref.

being working on this for the past 2 nites oredi.....

anyone can help me????

maybe my thread on refugium can help u understand my problem better.........