Advice? Near disaster/plumbing advice

You got it Dave. I have an AGA reef ready with two holes. I thought it through last night and ended up exactly with basically the same as you wrote. There's no sense to have the wasted pipe of that big a drain. I also like that if a fish tries to go down the main I can more than accommodate the flow.

I'm changing out the 3/4" bulkhead for a 1" one and will be using the 1.25" as the E drain. I did order a new gate valve at 1" and will make that transition. I want more buffer ability with the gate to put the overflow level where I want it rather than being maybe stuck with whatever the 3/4" will give me.

I ordered the Cepex ball valves too. I like that I'll be able to take them apart and clean them.

I also cleaned out my overflow last night. Holy sludge.

 

So it took me a while, but I'm finally ready to add water. As soon as I have another 5 gallons made up and at temp it should be enough to get it going. I really should have ordered another bulkhead to convert the E drain to hard pipe. I just didn't think about it at the time. I'm going to order a bulkhead and I still need a couple of strainers for the stand pipes, so I'll have to swap the E drain hose out later. Anyway, this is where I ended up.




I'm open for constructive criticisms, kind remarks, or "Hey idiot..." Whatever floats your boat.

 

One will have a reactor with biopellets which I got for Christmas from the wifey, one will be for an ATS which I will make sometime in the next few months, and the other is there for whatever future option comes, possibly GFO.

 

I got it back up and running! I'm so ecstatic. There are no leaks on anything that I did. There is just one very slow leak here:



I've taken it apart and put it back together. It's a lot better now, but still leaks. It's brand new... Not sure what I'm going to do about this yet.

Meanwhile, my tank was doing better before Christmas and I was really making headway on my turf algae situation, but I realized today that my tank sitter fed almost an entire package of mysis shrimp to my tank in 6 days!!!!!!



Seriously. There was only a few missing from this when I left. So coupled with excessive feeding and then all filtration off of it for over a week my tank has a nice turf again. Time to kick up the cleanings.