Please explain how these are independent.


Your return pump is pulling exactly the same amount of water that is entering the sump. If it wasn't the tank level in your DT or sump would either decrease or increase to the point of overflowing (or draining).

Your return pump flow rate is independent from your skimmer flow rate, hence matching them doesn't serve a purpose. Unless you feed your overflow water directly into your skimmer you have no way of really assuring overflow water isn't bypassed anyway. Typically a skimmer sits in a sump chamber, and water flows through the chamber to the next. You'll have a very hard time trying to come up with a system that insure overflow water enters your skimmer only once prior to moving on and that no water from the overflow can bypass the skimmer before moving on. Your skimmer is already designed with the correct pump for skimmer contact time so you're better off insuring your skimmer chamber gets a decent turnover rate, once equilibrium hits and your skimmer is sized accordingly to bio load it really makes no difference what turnover rate your sump skimmer sees. It makes more sense to size your return pump to properly skim your display tank and keep organics from settling.

Your right you can't be assured your skimmer is going to skim all the water coming into the chamber, hence the reason why you try and match it.

You want to try and "Capture" as much water from the DT with your skimmer as possible. Obviously your skimmer is not going to get all the water from your DT, but why would you want your DT draining twice as much water as the skimmer can take up? Ultimately, you are limited by your drains and how much they can handle (depends on the method you want to employ here). A herbie or Bean method can handle much more water then a standard durso.

The other variable at play here is your sump size. Having a smallish sump with a HUGE pump is going to move the water through the sump WAY to fast and really defeat the purpose of the sump. (that is if the purpose of your sump is to filter your DT water)

I don't use my return pump to keep organics from settling, I use powerheads. My return pump is used to get water from the DT to the sump for filtration.

At the end of the day you got to do what ever makes the most sense to you, you'll never get a solid answer on the subject and asking it just clogs up threads with two knuckle heads like us ;)

Ive been quietly sitting on the side lines, I kne this topic would bring out th best debate, its always does, the reason is I do not think there is an answer. As long as the tank is turned over adequately to be skimmed then we are all good.

I have decidded to ignore everyone :) and got for 1.5 times an hour turn over which matches the skimmer.

Next argument: 1 small daily water change or 10% every two weeks?

I hear that! Excellent (yet brief discussion) :)

I think the waveline would be a great option and very low power.

Sounds like the perfect box... How many Mitras are you going to run over it?

I am going to attempt one ;) I need to so the spread debate can end, having said that the PAR readings taken in Australia kind of do that for me ;)

http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=90491

I am waiting for a bit more info to come through, but the spread looks promising as I always suspected.

If it's automated then daily, if manual then weekly. Larger quantity less often is more effective than lower quantity more often but you have to consider stability as well.