tieing all my tanks into one system.

[ati70cutlass]

i have three tanks im trying to tie into a single system. i have a 180,75,20. i have a 75,40,110 sump. can someone help me figure out how to plumb this. maybe a el cheepo drawing showing me how to tie them into one. the 180 will be in a diff. room. while the other 2 will be in the same room as the 110 rubbermaid. im wanting to tie all of this so i can simplify everything

[DaveK]

Before you do this carefully consider the pluses an minuses.

On the plus side, you have one large system, so it's more stable. It will also be less work because you only need one skimmer, refugium, and other equipment.

On the minus side, if you have a problem it's in all three tanks. If you have a collapse of the system you loose everything, and you have no backup tanks. In addition, if you want different conditions in one tank, say a lower temp or salinity, that will not be possible.

In my opinion, it's not worth doing.

If you still are interested, it's really not too hard. All you need to do is to have an overflow on each tank and have them all run downhill to the input side of your sump. Then to plumb the return, you split it up with Ts and valves, and run a return to each tank.

The overflow pipes uses should be at least twice the size of the pipes used for the return. A somewhat larger difference is ok too.

In other words, if your return pipes are 1/2" you would want to use 1" or 1 1/4" on the overflow.

Be very sure your sump can hold all the live water in the system.

[BigAl07]

Good reply Dave.