Well FTD got back to me and got a sump ordered. Luckily red sea is fairly close to me (about 3 hours) so it should be in early next week.
Finished a preliminary install of the tank electronics. Due to some boring reasons I'm running both tanks off one of these expanding electronics boards so it's pretty packed already. I will then mount all the power bricks to a separate panel to install on the back of the tank so I can keep the wiring clean and still pull this panel out.
I plumbed in some basic fill hoses to the outlet, dumped my substate in, and started filling the tank up.
I made a few mistakes along the way, most I could correct. I definitely had some leaks in the plumbing between the main and aux sump, but after an hour or so of fiddling I got everything working as expected. These pumps are STRONG...I let them run all night at full blast and this is what I woke up to:
All the substrate moved around and a completely cloudy tank. I turned the pumps down to half, messed around with the overflows (this is a new process for me, still learning how it all works) and will let it run for the day and check in again.
The plan (once the water is clear) is to move over my geophagus tank with all of the biological media from the 2 fx6 canisters I have on there. This is a little scary for me, I've never seeded a tank with existing bio media and not sure if the gallon of seachem matrix will be enough on its own.
This also brings me to the last decision I have to make...what bio media I'm going to run in this sump. The aux sump I've decided will be a
refugium with pothos for nitrate reduction, but I'm stuck between learning how to set up a fluidized k1 bed or stick with what I know and dump a few gallons of matrix in there and call it a day.