Ebb & Flow Table Drain - Reservoir Not Under Table

I have an unused area in my grow space that I'd like to stuff a flood table into. This room has rather low ceilings, so instead of putting my reservoir under the table, I was toying with the idea of keeping the table about a foot off the ground, and pumping the water back out, and up, to my reservoir.

I was thinking of just draining the table into a small container underneath and using a sump/bilge pump to drain that back to the reservoir, but that feels like it's just water damage waiting to happen. I'm not sure that an inline pump is the right option either, because of my concerns of it running dry towards the end of draining.

Has anyone dealt with this before that could offer some input? Am I better off just taking the loss on vertical space and gravity draining to an appropriate reservoir?


Edit: I'm looking at some EcoPlus pumps that offer submersible / inline functionality. I have some more reading to do, but I think these will provide enough flow, as well as head, to get me sorted. I plan to tip the table and just elbow off the drain plug to my pump.


I'm concerned about power loss during the drain cycle in the setup above, so i think I found a middle ground.

I will gravity drain to a catch basin below the table, so that in the event of an outage the plants are not submerged until the pump comes back on. Because I won't be able to fit a large enough basin to catch a full table, I will have an emergency drain 3/4 of the way up this basin that will dump outside the building to prevent overflow indoors.

Eventually I will put a res at the end of this as well so I'm not dumping nutes (or backup power), but it's much better than water damage.

Some pics to help explain the idea:




The blue pipe will be for flooding, and the red a catch tank for draining. The yellow pipe will carry drainage back to the res via a sump pump in the drainage catch. In the event that this pump isn't functioning, a secondary overflow pipe will be installed higher up in the catch to carry water outside the building. (Shown as a little yellow stub in the first image, right side.)

Input greatly appreciated.