cleaning sump

How often are sumps supposed to be cleaned & the proper way to do it?

That is a good question, I have a refugium that I use and I have never cleaned it, but wondering if people clean their sumps. I would guess it would depend on the tye of sump you have.

Depends on how your dt looks. If the dt is outsatanding, that is what matters. The sump is where my string algae and bubble algae grow like mad. I don't care, that is what is for

I never set out with the intent to clean my sump. It usually is a sidethought while i'm doing something else like cleaning my skimmer or pumps or something.

We don't have a cabinet on our tank its an open stand so I like to keep my sump clean. I usually wet vac all the crap out and clean the glass and baffles every 8-10 weeks. I now keep filter socks on 24/7 so I don't have to do it that often any more. I run a very low nutrient tank so I dont have much algae

Lesely: What a nice setup, and I must say very crisp and clean. I noticed that you have the two chambers one with sand and rock and one with just live rock. How does that work at keeping the nutrients low, ie nitrates and phosphates? Wondering why you didn't go with a macro algae in the third chamber instead of live rock? I do like that set-up.

Old Tom said:

Lesely: What a nice setup, and I must say very crisp and clean. I noticed that you have the two chambers one with sand and rock and one with just live rock. How does that work at keeping the nutrients low, ie nitrates and phosphates? Wondering why you didn't go with a macro algae in the third chamber instead of live rock? I do like that set-up.

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HI, I did have the macro algae in the second chamber (tons of it ) with the live sand but I started to use Red sea nopox and didnt have enough nitrates or phos to keep it aliveI had to remove it when it browned off and started dying. .I did have a large amount of GHA in the full length overflow (none in display tank) but since using Nopox it has also died. Before the nopox I had fairly low readings anyway but now just about nothing.
before nopox - nitrates 0.25 phos 0.3 (were probably slightly higer as the GHA would have been consuming).
After nopox - nitrates 0.01 phos 0.01 and no algae what so ever. I actually have to be careful because sometimes they both read 0.