wet/dry or berlin sump for 55gal?

[600k4]

Hello all,
I was looking into getting a sump for the 55gal. The LFS by me only has the wet/dry megaflow by all-glass and says you are able to have a reef tank with that filter. I have heard that bio-balls dont work for reef tanks as the nitrites remain higher than ideal. LFS suggested I take out the bio-balls if I want (they wanted the sale). I was also looking at the berlin style sump I found at ***********. Also I would like to incorporate a fuge in the sump. Any suggestions for filtration would be great. Thanks.

 

[scsinet]

Use a 10-20 gallon fish tank. They are dirt cheap and you can easily buy a hunk of glass from Lowe's or the Depot and silicon it in there to form your fuge. The sump on my 55 reef is just a 10 gallon tank. I don't even use baffles.
BTW, your LFS is right. If you have 1.5lbs LR per gallon or more, and have a couple inches or more of substrate, running bio-balls only makes your filtration over efficient and runs your nitrates up too much between water changes. I have 75lbs of LR in my system and I run no biological filtration whatsoever except for my substrate and LR. It works out pretty good.

 

[600k4]

Thanks for the info. I would make one but dont have the time because I work 65+ hours a week right now, so i may get the megaflow and take out the bio balls....
So a deep sand bed and 75lbs of LR and sump with a skimmer and fuge should do the trick. After that I will get some nice lights so we can keep corals... also our skimmer is a HOB and we have a ton of micro bubbles so i'm hoping the sump rids us of this prob...