Anyone have pics of their rubbermade sumps? I saw Buds which gave me some ideas for my weekend project.

I've got this idea to build a cage from PVC (connected in a cube shape) and egg crate. The top will be hinged and filled with bio balls or LR. The top will either be a piece of acrylic or egg crate with a hole in the top that will hold my filter sock.

That cage will sit on one end. Hopefully between the sock and the balls, I won't get a lot of bubbles.

The other end will have my skimmer.

What I'm not sure about is whether I want to use the existing plug that sits in the middle as my output to my pump, or if I want to use a bucket in the middle and run a house out of that. The thought with the bucket is to drill some holes a few inches below the waterline so that I'll never be able to pump all of the sump water back into my tank (in case one of my returns gets blocked).

Anyway, I'll take pics as I construct this thing.

Here's an old picture of my rubbermaid sump. It's annotated for reference; I can't find one without the notes on it.

Hmm, I need a lid for mine. That might help with evaporation.

I still have half that lid somewhere... rhomer bought the other half - I'm not sure if he's still using it or not.

Loren, do you have any updates on yours? I've added the overflows from the refugium to mine and am going to start moving a couple of pieces of live rock from the 70g into the 100g today. I am going to put some kind of lid on half of mine and also looking at adding an ATO today.

Btw, on the advice of others, I replaced the stock bulkhead.

My wife was nice enough to help me excavate the boxes in the room I am going to use for the sump.

I didn't have enough water to fill so am waiting for next weekend.

I did build something for my filter sock. I cut a hole, which is smaller than the ring in the sock, in a bucket lid. I then drilled a bunch of holes in the bucket, similar to what you had done bud. Idea is that I can fill it with bio balls or LR and my chemi-pure bags. Much easier than a PVC/egg crate cage.

Chris, why aren't you using the lid now?

http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/8936/bucketod6.th.jpg (http://img178.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bucketod6.jpg)

this is my work in progress sump. The water goes in to the 3" pvc drips through a sponge goes through some sechem matrix goes through another sponge, then into the bucket and out via a good pump (which is what I do not have yet). under my tank only has room for 13"x13"x24" so I am using just about all of the room with this thing.

oops. read that wrong. oh well.

Chris, why aren't you using the lid now?

I moved to a 120g acrylic tank for my sump instead - the rubbermaid was just too difficult to work with as a sump for a variety of reasons. I just didn't need the lid, and the 3/4" acrylic is too valuable to just throw away...

Ohhh yeah. For some reason I thought it was setup but I think you sold it? Anyway, if you don't want the half lid I'd be interested in it. I can probably use it as a pattern for another half.