250g Maintenance Free (sorta)

This is what I have been working on for the past several months, I just have neglected to post very much about it. It has the following features:
Drip system
Pump station to remove waste water
Up flow under gravel system
GFCI protected electrical system
25g bio-media chamber
40g surge volume in the event of power failures
(UV sterilizer is currently on another tank)
Two spiggots plumbed into tank stand
Ultra quiet stand pipes plumbed through the bottom
Lots of storage area

The stand is finished on the inside with maple and is partitioned into four cupboards. In the first cupboard is the wet/dry. The wet/dry is connected to the pump station (3rd cupboard) through the rear of the stand with some tubing and bulkheads (I drilled both). Since the stand is divided into four sections, I was faced with the constraint of very little space for the equipment. I made the tank for the wet/dry to fit tightly in the first cupboard and was only left with 25 gallons for bio-media. I currently have 240 scrubbies in there and there is room for about an even three hundred. With the superior surface area to volume ratio of scrubbies, I was able to get more than enough bio-media into my limited space. The emitter of the drip system is to the right on the brown hose.

The drip tray is made of plastic pegboard from Lowes (a precious find by Milkman). It is lined with quilt batting from Walmart.

The pump is resting on an unrolled scrubbie to keep it from transmitting vibrations to the tank walls. This keeps the noise down and also adds to the bio-media (just a little).

Here are some pics of the construction of the wet/dry. I chose to keep it simple because of the space constraints. I also chose to only use one type of bio-media. All media does one job...to house bacteria. Sumps with multiple media's look impressive but in reality...they do only one job.

And the drip tray...

I put a piece of egg crate on the bottom to keep the quilt batting off the bottom. This allows the water to drain through all of the batting rather than just what is over the holes. You can see in the last pic that the quilt batting does an excellent job and the dirt is uniform rather than a bunch of dirty dots.

Also note that I purposely installed the ridges in the pegboard to be on the inside. This keeps the egg crate elevated off the holes and allows for more drainage.

This is the only eventful thing in the second compartment. It is the water supply (the waste goes out through the same hole). The top spiggot is for the drip system and the bottom one is for a general water supply for fast filling and for other smaller tanks nearby.

The drip system is composed of the pressure regulator (the black thing on the spiggot), the brown hose, and a drip emitter (black thing in wet/dry). There is not enough chlorine in my water to worry about a build up in my tank. It dissipates before it reaches a measureable level. The first color chip on my test kit is .01 ppm, and it doesn't even reach that.

The hose with the tee in the back connects the wet/dry and the pump station. The pump station is in the third compartment and is covered in the next post. The purpose of the tee and tubing is for venting. I had trouble with vapor lock due to air trapped as a result of sagging. The pressure created by the elevated water level in the wet/dry was not enough to push the air bubble out. I also use the hose on the vertical part of the tee to hold up the horizontal hose, preventing sagging.

The pump station was partly covered in my thread of my plumbing in preparation for this tank. http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=55152

Basically a pump station looks like this

It is a pump controlled by a float switch. The float switch is adjustable by where it is attached to and how much cord is paid out.

And here is the pump station installed and in action.

The last cupboard should have its own thread, but the picture looks so simple...

The electrical system is all GFCI protected. The outlets are separated internally so that I could control the top with the float switch. The bottom one is controlled with the switch next to it. It turns off the circulation pump in the wet/dry for maintenance and feeding. The outlets on the GFCI are turned forward for electrical access for non-fish related tasks (the tank blocks the outlet on that wall).

The wiring for the GFCI and the protected external circuits is a bit involved and is beyond the scope of this thread. Every GFCI is sold with a wiring diagram and instructions. It is easier to follow the diagram than to explain it. It really isn't that hard.

This is my under-gravel cleaning system. It causes the water to flow up through the gravel rather than down through it. The under gravel system was planned out before adding water or gravel. The hardest part was resisting the urge to add water untill I had the measurements. I filled it before it was done, so I was really testing my measuring and cutting skills.

In the first picture in the previous post, the filtered water travels up the black pipe and down the white pipe. The purpose of this is so that the tank does not drain out during a power failure. There is a small hole above the water line that will allow air to enter, breaking the syphon created.

After the test fit, I removed the under-gravel system to paint it.