My rough sketchup

Yeah,that looks like it should work well.It would be wise to research the plumbing well to ensure good unimpeded flow to the skimmer section and a valve to control flow through your fuge.The fuge will be much more effective with a slow flow through it and this would also reduce noise from water spilling into the return section.

 

great thanks.

 

also, i was looking at stocking for the 50. Im definitely going to do a dwarf fuzzy lion, an Inimicus, what ever type i find first, and then a leaf scorpion. What i was wondering is if it would be pushing it to put a small female indian ocean lyretail anthias in there too. Ive read mixed things. The tank would be scapeed to give the most swiming room as possible for both the lion and the anthias, but if this combo is bound to fail i wont try it. Its just that anthias are my favorite open water swimmers and it would really give the tank movement and color. thanks

 

1. I know your pic shows a hang on overflow (that might be for simplicity in the drawing) but I would absolutely recommend getting a reef ready display tank or simply drilling it yourself. If your starting from scratch, don't bother with a hang on overflow.

2. more importantly, I see you have a tee off the overflow going to the fuge and skimmer section. Do NOT do this. If you want to supply water to the fuge, do it from the return pump, NOT from the drain. That way you can put a valve on it and adjust the flow however you'd like.

3. if you had a large tank with multiple drains (overflows) you could safely get away with running a drain right into the fuge but you really lose a lot of flow control as you NEVER want to put a gate or ball valve on a drain!

 

about the overflow. its rated for 800 gph so its more than enough in that respect? Why are HOBs worse than drilled overflows?

 

can someone explain to me why a power loss results in water on the floor when you have a HOB overflow? Also how can you prevent this?

 

This should not be the case. Possibly this could happen if you run your waterline too high in your sump to compensate for the initial water that would come down until the end of the teeth on the overflow. But, if you run your sump correctly with enough room to handle that extra bit, the overflow should then break siphon - traditionally that happens with the U-tubes in the original overflow designs. They will draw air and the water flow will stop. It's late ... and I am not speaking too clearly, I hope this makes sense.

 

With a HOB overflow, you have to run it "near it's maximum gph rate". This keeps the microbubbles the intake box produces going thru the utube. If you throttle back the flow and the bubbles CANT make it thru the utube, they will collect at the top, making a giant bubble that will break your siphon.

With a drilled tank, water obviously isn't going over the rim so you have zero worries about "loosing" a syphon. You can have your overflow only doing 100 GPH or 10 GPH if you wanted.

Murphys law.
utube style HOB overflows work fine, I turn mine off every day to feed and it never looses syphon. However, I do worry about it. AND, my GPH is about 2 times more than I'd prefer. Which effects skimmer performance, soc performance and so forth. and I do worry about it because, well, you never know.

Just "do it right" and get or make a drilled tank! ;D