First off...nice to meet ya! I love Utah...really do. I was just there again two years ago. I never get enough of hiking the hills there... Me thinks the prarie dogs know me by name now!
I do regulate the flow into the fuge by way of the ball valve. Again, for about an 8 week period, I had bangai cardinal fry in there and kept the water to a trickle. Now that they've moved out, I've increased the flow. By "guestimating" with my untrained eye, I would guess that 1/4 of the overflow was rushing into the fuge. Now, I have it at about 1/3. There are a series of 6 1/2 inch holes in the wall between the fuge and the return pump chamber. The water cascades over that wall. The water flow is not so heavy that it actually projects from the holes.
My Mag7 return pump is in the second chamber from the right. It's hidden by the center brace of the stand in the pictures above. There is also more live rock in the rest of the sump now.
I've gone without a media bag/filter sock on the overflow. I tried it with my old sump, but found that it was far too labor intensive to keep clean. If you fail to do so, your nitrates will spike. I don't use any sponges, or anything else on powerheads, pumps etc. for that same reason. PLUS, my goal with the sumpfugium was to INCREASE my pod and mysid populations. The sock/bag traps TONS of these micro crusties where they will eventually die.
Instead, I let the detritius settle and when I do water changes, I use a pump and hose and vaccume those chambers clean. I simply shut off the Mag7, scrape walls, suck out nusiance alga (I sometimes get this red, puffy hair algae down there), vaccume while siphoning, move the skimmer shelf and clean there, put the Euroreef Skimmer back in place, replace the 10-15 gallons I've siphoned, let it all settle for another hour or so, and turn the pump back on.
I don't do much with the fuge except thin the macro out, pull out more of that red hair/tuft algae and blow off the LR with a turkey baster from time to time.
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