Fuge maintence question

[sarmo]

sorry for the dumb question but i need a little advice here. i have a 500 gallon display that overflows into a remote 150 gallon refugium and that into my sump and back to the display. the fuge has 5-6" of 1-2mm aragonite gravel set up like a pleneum and is full of macro algae.

my question is, how often do those of you with refugiums siphon the gravel?

PS- i know it's best to have the fuge overflow directly into the display but that was not an option in my case.

thanks for the help :thumbsup:

 

[sarmo]

nothing??? no one has any suggestions?
well i siphoned out the top 1 to 1 1/2 inches of the sand. there was a ton of detritis on top of the sand after i moved the macro out of the way and i decided i needed to get it out of there.
if that was wrong, why???

 

[tylorarm]

I've never seen much need to siphon the gravel with similar setup to you. Gravity fed from DT overflow, then fuge overflows to sump. Not much food or other detritis gets in there and there's a ton of fireworms and pods that keep it pretty clean. I also have a decent amount of flow in my fuge, with a tunze 6100, maybe that helps. I also rarely if ever scrape the glass, figure the 'bugs' will take care of that. However, i do have a bit of cyno in there now, and i'll probably suck it off the surface.

 

[tylorarm]

with a syphon of course