Custom Refugium
I've seen a lot of people here ask questions about building their own refugium so I'd thought I'd share my custom fuge sitting under my 90 gallon. I started off with a 29 gallon fish tank and then went to lowes to have some glass cut for the baffles. The glass you get from lowes is way to thin 1/8" thick so I used aquarium safe silicone and combinethe glass panes for each of the baffles. I had some extra glass left over after the fact to make a bubble trap for the intake line. I then decided how what deminsions I wanted for the chambers. For the skimmer section I wanted it to be big enough to handle extra pumps for media reactors and also because I have a recirculating skimmer a needed room for the feed pump. Overall I think I settled on about 15 inches. Next I decided to make the middle section the return section and after the 3 baffles used about 7 inches. Plenty of room for my mag 9.5. Last all the way to the right I made the fuge section and made a high baffle which is about 4 inches below the top of the tank. The fuge section is about 8 inches give or take. Since it was my first refugium build and I hadn't really used silicone before I probably used more silicone then I needed but I figured better safe then sorry. I also ran a ribbon of silicone over the top of the baffles so I wouldn't cut myself during maintenance. Overall I think it worked out very well. Also I'd like to add that I did not use any flex hose and only used 3'4 inch black tubing to connect my return pump to PVC. I installed ball&check valves for the return line and the fuge section intake. I attached a 4' long 2X4 along the entire back of the stand in order to safely mount the PVC pipe. This also enabled me to secure my power strips and timers so they wouldn't be resting on the floor in case of any leaks. The 90 gallon is drilled and I'm using a megaflow overflow system. s far as noise is concerned I have it sitting in my living room with a home theatre and can barely hear the tank while watching movies.
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