what return pump do I use for a 220RR tank.

I have a rio 2500 and a rio 3100 on my 180. it seems to work well. I prefer internal pumps for redundancy.

I would recommend a pair of 3100s for you.

 

That 7-10 times per hour number seems a bit high to me. I had always heard 3-5 times tank volume per hour, the skimmer and refugium will only process so much water per hour any flow in excess of that is unnecessary. Seems to me like you would be okay with a total flow of about 1000 gph after head loss.
Of course for total flow you will want about 20-30 times tank volume.

Anyways... just my 2 cents

 

If your tank has standard overflows the most you will be able to run through the two 1" drains is about 1200GPH MAX and your going to get gurgling at that flow.


As long as the flow through the sump is enough to maintain a steady temp in the display it's enough. Since temp is the one parameter that is going to swing the fastest. Everything else follows after. For what it's worth I run a very low flow through my sump on my 350 gallon. I run a single eheim 1262 running through a chiller, 9 feet of horizontal piping and about 5 ft of vertical head. I'm only running about 1 time per hour turnover rate through the sump and if you have seen pics of my tank in my other threads you can see that is works perfectly fine. My tank has steady parameters and my SPS are growing very well. Flow within the tank is another thing, I have up to 14,000gph of random flow with the 3 vortech's

 

General rule of thumb for the return would be to target the processing capacity of your skimmer.

My skimmer processes 450 gph in my 72g system so my return is 420 gph.

-Eric