Krish
RF STAFF
I just replied to a thread that sparked the idea for this one. We all have some neat tricks up our sleeves that we use to help make the hobby a bit easier for us. It could be anything from tricks to doing a water change in a matter of mins to neat ways to feed your fish etc. I thought it would be nice to share some of these tricks or tips you may use as it might be useful for others. I'll go first! 
If you look in the picture below, you will see the red arrow pointing to an elbow (90 degree fitting) on my return pump. I use to do this with all of my return pumps for two reasons. One was, bubbles rise so the lower you can suck water from in your sump, the less chances you will have of transferring any micro-bubbles back into the tank if they do happen to make it into your return chamber. The second reason is it buys you a bit of time where top offs are concerned. If something happens (ie your ATO fails or you are late in topping off your sump one day), by sucking this low in the sump, you can go a few extra hours (even to the point where your return pump is partly out of the water) before having to top off as the water level will have to drop below 1/2 inch or so in the return chamber before the pump starts sucking air.
The blue arrow points to a "Tee" fitting I always put on my input coming in to the sump. I use to have a lot of gurling and belching coming from the input into the sump and found out that a lot of the time (in my case) it was caused by the water entering the sump colliding with itself. What I mean by that is with just imagine a straight pipe for your intake and the water coming out at the bottom and not being dispersed anywhere but back up, so the water that flows in behind it just crashes into it so I put a "Tee" which re-directs the water out to the sides where it can't colide and therefore it flows freely. Problem solved. I had to do this on two different sumps to eliminate belching.
Just two tricks I used so far. Let's hear yours!
If you look in the picture below, you will see the red arrow pointing to an elbow (90 degree fitting) on my return pump. I use to do this with all of my return pumps for two reasons. One was, bubbles rise so the lower you can suck water from in your sump, the less chances you will have of transferring any micro-bubbles back into the tank if they do happen to make it into your return chamber. The second reason is it buys you a bit of time where top offs are concerned. If something happens (ie your ATO fails or you are late in topping off your sump one day), by sucking this low in the sump, you can go a few extra hours (even to the point where your return pump is partly out of the water) before having to top off as the water level will have to drop below 1/2 inch or so in the return chamber before the pump starts sucking air.
The blue arrow points to a "Tee" fitting I always put on my input coming in to the sump. I use to have a lot of gurling and belching coming from the input into the sump and found out that a lot of the time (in my case) it was caused by the water entering the sump colliding with itself. What I mean by that is with just imagine a straight pipe for your intake and the water coming out at the bottom and not being dispersed anywhere but back up, so the water that flows in behind it just crashes into it so I put a "Tee" which re-directs the water out to the sides where it can't colide and therefore it flows freely. Problem solved. I had to do this on two different sumps to eliminate belching.
Just two tricks I used so far. Let's hear yours!
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