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Chillers And Sumps

956 Views 4 Replies 4 Participants Last post by  crazy loaches, 
H
Hey everybody i was wanting some informationwith planted tanks and just tank setups in general i was wondering if anybody could explain to me what chillers and sumps do please?
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tazcrash69
In short a chiller is air conditioning for your aquarium water. If you are in a place where ambient room temps are very high, or you have serious reef style lighting. Much more common on reef set-ups than planted tank setups.

A Sump, is a basically a container to hold water, and equipment (heaters, pumps, probes,etc...) that usually sits under you tank, and is part of a water circulation or filter system. Also more common in Reef set-ups than planted tanks, but much more common than chillers.
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mrkookm
A sump has the ability to provide un-matched filtration to any body of water and is usually the filtration of choice on larger volumes of water 'big tanks'. It is also much easier to add equip inline or additional media to aid filtration which provides superior performance to that of a canister regarding its ability to polish, remove organics and promote larger healthy active bio growth.

The downside to a sump is its cost to setup and for planted tankers, it's inefficiency at retaining co2...... but good co2 can still be maintained if good Co2 diffusion is used. While a canister user might refil their 10lb tanks every 8m ~ 1year, us sump users will have to do so in a month or 3m depending.

Chillers, like tazcrash69 said is like an air-conditioning for you tank to maintain stable temps. If you decide on keeping certain species of plants or fish that requires a specific temp range to survive and you water gets too hot, then you will have to consider cooling options.....a chiller being one of them.
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H
chillers and sumps

cheers guys for the replys thay are a great help. well i dont think i will need a chiller but i think i will look into converting one of my tanks into a sump...



thanks again
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C
A great site for learning about sumps is http://www.melevsreef.com/what_sump.html make sure you have a good grasp of whats involved, its a tad more complex then just throwin' on a new filter and plugging it in. I am building my first sump setup (in my 240g thread) and its taken me several months to get it going, although I am building everything from scratch myself. Oh, and welcome to the forums!
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