sump

ok i gave it tons of thought, up most nights tossing and turning, wat size, how i'l support the tank,how i'm gonna devide it, pipe work, media and now for square one how the hell do i clamp the glass together wen siliconing it?

just to get u started Darren.
Sump

Mick.......

the sump that came with mine is around 1/4 the volume of the main tank. build it as big as you can the more water/filtration the better

can you put it in the cabinet under the tank? and just put extra support under the base where the sump is?

as for piping, you want an overflow chamber in the corner, at the height you want the water to be in the tank (2" from tank top or whatever)
inside that chamber you want 1 pipe at 1" below the chamber height that runs into your sump (surface pipe)
then you want a pipe from the bottom (or 1" from the bottom) of the chamber going to the sump with a tap/valve on it you can control the flow with (base pipe). this is for a VERY good reason, as i discovered...
if you close the base pipe valve, all the chamber fills and water goes down your surface pipe but will cause a vortex and a constant sucking noise like a sink does near the end of draining. constantly.
if you fully open the base pipe you get a waterfall noise which is very relaxing but causes a weak bladder and gets annoying at night...
i have it half way so the chamber is full and slowly flowing down the surface pipe and the base pipe but there is no noise from the surface pipe

then your return pipe goes in preferrably at the opposite end of the tank to the chamber (for some reason mine doesnt it blasts it across the tank from the chamber area) so wate ris flowing thru like a river. aaah

as for media you want to look at how the flow goes around the chambers, but generally coarse mechanical (foam) first then fine mechanical then i have ceramic balls (about 5kg) and peat pellets topped with floss for polishing (floss is accessable first for easy changing)

i will try to put up a pic of how the chambering is in mine, i think its a better method than some i have seen (excuse the bad drawing there are 2 walls per chamber, 1st is raised 2nd is at bottom so you get illustrated fow directions

EDIT: file format is f***ed so cant put it up, took me half hour to do too. we dont even have MS draw on this thing