Freshwater sump good idea or bad

[Lolo8234]

I’m getting a 120 gallon tank with a sump and I was looking for some sump tips if you have pls tell me 

[Bill Smith]

I have sumps on my two larger tanks.

In the sump, I took a 2 gallon bucket, drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom so water could pass through easily, and filled it with pot scrubbers for bio media. Once that was elevated a few inches off the bottom, I had all the dividing I needed. No silicon divider work!

Then, I laid a piece of floss foam on top of that, and it becomes very easy to maintain.

My sump handles my heater, UV sterilizer, auto-water-changes, and fertilizer dosing.

Highly recommended!

[Lolo8234]

Thank you so much 

[MickS77]

Good idea. I'll never go back to lugging around canister filters. I really like using two DC return pumps for redundancy. They are silent and you can control the amount of water getting returned to the tank. It's helpful if you're running an overflow box. Have check valves of some kind on your returns so in the event of a power failure your sump doesn't overflow from back siphoning. Get some leak detection alarms. Sumps are awesome. I really like filling them up with as much bio media as I can so I'll always have some to start new tanks with.