Refugium plumbing question

[jarhead]

I have to redo my drain plumbing completely because of all the drain noise caused by hard PVC. Currently, both 1" overflows tee under the stand into 2" PVC. In the basement, the drain splits to the refugium and the sump.
Current setup
I want to run 2 1" flex PVC pipes all the way down into the basement. The question is how to "feed" the fuge when I run 2 1" pipes down? I was thinking of tee'ing off one drain pipe or putting a wye on the return pipe instead. Something like this.

 

[jarhead]

I drew a rough diagram of what I want to do. Will this work?

 

[Modo]

I think it would work fine. You just need to be sure the overflow from the 26g will be able to handle all the water from the tank's 2 overflows and refugium.

Why not just have the 75g as your main sump with skimmer? What's the benefit of the 26g? Or even better, why not have the 75g as your refugium? I don't think you really need the 3rd tank from the drawings. But, I'm just drawing conclusions.

..oh and I'm jumping to another assumption here as well. I would imagine that you have the refuge seperate because of slower flow across the algae etc. It looks like the 75g has baffels and if set up right could really be an impressive fuge. I've included an excerpt from Dr. Shimek

The sump is 20" from front to back. This means that around 2600 GPH of water will be flowing across this area I'll be using as a refugium. Is this too much flow?

As you indicate above, it is almost a trivially low flow. The amount of water flow on a real reef, particularly the reef crest is amazing. Some calculations done from literature values indicate that on an average reef crest, there will be on the order of 50,000 gallons per hour through the volume of a 100 gallon tank. So... your flow of 2600 gal/hr, although it sounds impressive, is almost non-existent compared to nature. In other words, it is a good algae growing swamp...

 

[jarhead]

I think it would work fine. You just need to be sure the overflow from the 26g will be able to handle all the water from the tank's 2 overflows and refugium.

When I was testing the plumbing with the 2" drain PVC, the 26g sump was able to handle the flow w/o a problem.

Why not just have the 75g as your main sump with skimmer? What's the benefit of the 26g? Or even better, why not have the 75g as your refugium? I don't think you really need the 3rd tank from the drawings. But, I'm just drawing conclusions.

Originally, I bought the 26g as my main sump and plumbed the skimmer to it. When I started to test the system, it turned out that the water was being sucked out of the sump completely and the pump started drawing air. Instead of replacing the 26g, I just added the 75g on the bottom. Now, the 26g also acts as a "bubble trap".
http://a6.cpimg.com/image/8A/A9/1832154 ... 60200-.jpg

 

[Modo]

Okay, gotcha!
Since that 75 is just sitting down there, have you thought about making it a grow out tank? You could easily attach some lighting on the underneath of the stand.

Pretty cool setup. What size is the main tank?

 

[jarhead]

What is a grow out tank? You're talking to a newbie who is setting up his first tank (135g). So are you saying that my planned out new plumbing will work?