Heater question and check valve question

[brigoody]

I have finished building my stand for my 90gallon tank. I am new to the hobby, so the advice from this forum has been great. My questions today are concerning placement of the heater. I have a 20x16x10 (15 gallon) sump. I would like to hide the heater and other equipment in the sump, but the 300watt heater is 15 in. long. Should I buy two smaller watt heaters or is it possible to place this one in my built in overflow? Or is there a 300watt heater that is less than 12 in.? Any suggestions?

Next is again concerning my small sump and my worry of overflowing in a power outage. I put a check valve on my return line. When I shut off my return pump to test, other than a very small leak (Is this Normal?), no water was draining back into the sump. Is this a good thing to do or am I slowing down my return pump flow rate? If so, then other than buying a bigger sump, what are my options? It seems like I would have to have a very low water level in my sump to handle the water draining back into the sump in case of a power outage.

I've included a pic of my sump

[MSU Fan]

Just so you know, check valves don't work very well for SW plumbing because the salt creep, calcium build-up, etc will basically stop it from working. Sorry!

As for the heater, I don't know of a short 300w heater, so you would probably want 2 smaller ones.

And your sump should always have enough room to handle all the excess water that will drain into it once the return pump is shutoff, regardless of check valves and other items that *may* help. Perhaps an auto-top off would help regulate a lower water level.

[animalparamedic]

You could try an inline heater instead... I have the Hydor ETH series and have been very pleased with it - still out of sight under the tank...i just plumbed it inline on the return...
Here's a link for it at Drs Foster & Smith - http://www.drsfostersmith.com/produc...9&pcatid=11369

Just my two cents, FWIW

[h8z2luze]

Those are really cool I think I am going to go with one of those