Thanks again for the insightful and "fact based" information!
London, ah, to be perfectly honest I'm bored with it... and long for the recreational opportunities and relaxed outdoor lifestyle and adventure I left behind on the West Coast of the US. I found the quirks here fascinating and entertaining, but even the novelty of that wears off in time. I can't say that I'd been entirely crazy about the years I spent on the Eastern Seaboard to be honest. Let me know if you're ever in town, and we'll meet up for a warm pint of bitter!
I do greatly admire your system and your technological fetish/expertise, which I'll still have to study further to try to get my head around aspects such as the automated water changes. My own aim is to achieve a simpler and more minimal system and maintenance routine, though I realize I won't achieve quite as healthy and safeguarded of a system by doing so.
Basically at this point, when the project of doing my house finishes, I anticipate a tank upgrade, which is supported by my other as she too despised the curved corners of my current all-in-one. (And my longed for discus tank as well!) Silence is critical, and so I'm undecided whether to build a custom all-in-one or to maybe have an external overflow and sump. Either way, I don't want any equipment visible at all. Here are a few examples of designs I modeled and was initially considering -
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/SxoAalyqFDNvYbIIV6IyypxTzEJGZ8cqOuMdhIiUg5c?feat=directlink
I'm not sure which would be quieter/safer/better, to have like a Tunze 9005 skimmer and rear tank biofilter and chaeto compartments which I could cover to cloak their noise, or to use a sump with the skimmer like yours there and have a stand with an open back/acoustical dampening louver back/or solid back with computer fans. If your overflow makes noise, then perhaps I'd aim for a much wider overflow, or a beananimal.
I don't wish to futz around with things, so either way I guess I'd live with chaeto rather than an ATS. In my current tank I actually used a bottom layer of mineralized topsoil (baked/boiled), mixed with iron-rich clay, and hand-me-down miracle mud. I have limited algae growth, and now that I've planted seagrass (Star Grass and Shoal Grass), I'm waiting to see if it takes off and suppresses algae further through allelopathy. If I had thick seagrass growth in a refugium, which is non-limited due to being planted in soil, then that and mangroves could perhaps be effective at mopping up phosphates and nitrates.
I guess I'd use Tunze powerheads tucked away in the rockwork rather than MP10's, due to the noise factor. Though I wonder if that's a Faustian trade-off, if in-tank powerheads cause additional heat which requires the chiller to kick on often... How much of the time is your chiller running by the way? And I bought Vantec Stealth fans from RapidLED to replace my current ones, though haven't gotten around to that yet. Are the Nocturna quieter still?
For lighting, I'm thinking of either building one or two long LED light cannons, so the source is tucked far enough up inside a mirrored tube with an angled cut to the front, that you wouldn't be getting light spill or seeing any source, or having DIY aluminum section bars of LED's resting on the tank rim. To allow for cooling of the tank and lights but prevent light spill, if I do the LED bars on top of the tank, then I'd cover the entire tank with a non-vision air transfer grille which would allow heat and humidity but not light or fish to escape. I could add some fans mounted atop that to increase the airflow as well. I'll totally copy your light mix however, but maybe include a remote controlled RGB strip around the perimeter of the tank in case I do want a tiny bit of green and red evenly distributed but tune-able.
A rear tank sump would allow me to have a chiller, 30 gallon water change/mixing barrel, and 5 gallon auto-top off in the stand, and thus a relatively self-contained complete tank system and maintenance package. I'd need a canister filter still to run water through the chiller, which could house my carbon and GFO, unless I found a drop-in-chiller instead. I'd include an overflow drain from the tank, so to do water changes I could just flip a pump switch and pump the water from the barrel to overflow my tank. Otherwise I'd need quite a big stand to fit all that and a sump in the stand. I'm currently supplementing mostly just by mixing a saturated kalk/vinegar solution into my top-off water, and adding additional manually if necessary.
But a regular sump would increase the total water surface area, and hopefully thus increase evaporation and oxygenation. I'd like to do all that I can to prevent heat build-up, to try to avoid having a chiller running. And I guess this factor might lend itself to using an external pump and sump rather than a rear tank sump with submersible pump? Or I could do a mini-fridge hack instead of a chiller, which might be quieter and less expensive.
If I suspect that type of a sump set-up might be audible still, I might even set my tank up with just a full width rear overflow and pipe out to another room where I could set up all my equipment, so then it'd be just a pipe in and pipe out and I'd skip the powerheads even. It wouldn't be easy to arrange and build it that way however.
Going without Vortech MP's would mean that I wasn't able to use their battery backup, which leaves me in a quandary about my other options, being that a UPS dies so quickly. I suppose buying an actual generator is cheaper than buying an MP10 however! Maybe I need a fuel cell... And I'm not yet convinced about a tank controller.
Yikes, a very wordy reply, which hopefully isn't off-topic, but just a slightly different take to try and achieve much the same goals. These topics do necessarily involve a lot of detail however!...
