Good evening folks.
The weather here has been beautiful but it was really cool at the beginning of this week and not a lot got done on the house and yard.
I'm trying to consolidate my aquariums and get things moved around so that we can start remodeling the house. I got my 30 gallon Aquarium tuned up fairly well after the awful overflow debacle.
Inspired by that success, I decided to set up a sump on my 55 gallon aquarium. This was always the plan of course, but I was going to wait until after the remodeling. It turned out to be a big headache to get this thing up and tuned and running right and I lost a lot of sleep over the past 3 days. I rebuilt the overflow system three times before I realized that I had a more basic problem I was not solving.
In the end I had a very efficient system that moves a lot of water, holds a lot of biological media, and runs very quietly.
It also takes a very little real estate in my tank which is nice. Anyhow the white pipe inside the tank is my overflow catch, and it's connected by a clear plastic U-siphon to the black outside pipe, which is the Overflow basin.
That Basin drains to the sump through a very short piece of blue and black pool sweep hose. I'm using the same size 10 gallon sump and the same size pool sweep hose and the same size pump, on the sump for my 30-gallon tank. Yet, due to careful porting and planning, the one on my 55 gallon tank flows nearly twice as much water
Prototype overflow system for the 55 gallon tank.
This was not a real success, as the whole business was not steady enough.
The flow rate was terrific but I had to choke it off a lot to prevent noise. Also it could tip a little bit under certain conditions. Just a little movement in a four foot long tank can cause quite a bit of extra water to go down the drain.
In the end I was successful but there was a lot of stress involved in getting there.
We have been having meetings with contractors and looking at products, making sketches and discussing what we're going to do with our house.
After a lot of meetings we finally selected the contractor & went out selecting floors and countertops and cabinets and sinks. We still have to pick paint and baseboards and a few little bits.
Anyhow between all this business and my lack of sleep I have not had much time to think about the Mossberg's. I did see a Ruger Mini-14 on sale at Davidson's today that I would like to buy because it's 300 Blackout. If it did had the wooden stock I would have fell for it but because it had the plastic stock I passed.
