overflow box setup

[Ratfish]

Building a new tank 38gal with sump. I get to keep my not so reef friendly lemonpeel! It will be a Fowlr tank, looking at 3 fish max with some inverts.

The tank isn't drilled so I am thinking of using a siphon overflow box. Though they sound a bit worry some if power goes out. I would like to see how other people have their boxes set up. Right now I am looking at the Eshopps overflow boxe as my first option.

My other option of course is to have it drilled so not to worry about power outage. This tank is about as small as I wanted to go (small tanks scare me, I like the cushion of volume) so I am including a 8-10 gal sump for a little extra water volume. Any thoughts on boxes/set up would be welcome.

For filtration I will probably only run an eshopps nano skimmer and a phosbane reactor. I am also looking into bioballs though know little about them. I need to find that square plastic grating I've seen people cut to fit. Links?

Thanks all!

 

[Ichthys]

The square grating is called Eggcrate, i bought 2 sheets yesterday at Homedepot for 12.95 each. The external overflow box works fine, i have found the trick is to have enough flow to push and bubbles that build up in the j tube all the way thru, or, to not allow any bubbles to form in first place. It is is plumbed correctly it will restart in a power failure. A lot of people use aqualifters to make them more failsafe.

 

[dawgwe1]

I use eshopps overflows on both my tanks and never have a problem. I turn the sump pump off daily when I feed fish and never loses syphon.

 

[Ratfish]

thanks for the reassurance, thanks again Ichthys. The overflow will work out for the design. The sump I got has "shelves" for the egg crate. I plan on getting a few sheets soon.