Plumbing Design - Please comment!

[jrgilles]

Hey guys!

I've purchased all my plumbing parts and am about to assemble it.

I wanted to post my plans up here first though to see if there were any newbie mistakes I was making in the layout.

My sump tank sits on a shelf extending 6 inches out behind the back of the tank, so the plumbing can flow straight down into it.

One thing I was wondering about is should I put a 90 degree bend just below the overflow box then another 90 to turn it straight down, instead of just going straight down? I was thinking that might make it all run quieter.

The basic flow is to come out of the overflow box and down through a 1.5” drain pipe, with a Tee splitting off a bit of flow to go to the refugium (there is a hose barb there, and I’ll do a flexible 1” tube to get to the fuge, with a ball valve for flow control.), then it flows down, across the sump, and down again into the fill tank.

Also, how should I handle the piece of pipe in the fill tank? Should I perforate it with holes for drainage? Or just have it flow down and have the pipe terminate a few inches above the bottom? I was going to put a filter sock over the pipe to remove detritus.

For the return, I’m using a 900 GPH Ehein 1262 return pump. It goes up to a 4 way junction, where I will have a drain line to the left (hose barb with a ball valve), a return line to the sump to the left (so I can reduce flow if needed to the tank without building up more head pressure) and then the return line coming out of the top to return to the tank.

The fuge will just overflow and drain back into the sump tank.

If anyone has any advice on things to change with this, I’d love to hear it. Thanks!

Rob

 

[ccCapt]

What kind of overflow box do you have and what size tank is this for? If your using a 1.5" drain line, which can handle aprox 1200 gph, the overflow box should be about 14" wide. You are also using a pump rated at 900 gph before head loss which is alot less than the overflow can handle. I would worry about air getting trapped in the overflow because of the slow flow thru it and possibly causing some flooding.

 

[jrgilles]

What kind of overflow box do you have and what size tank is this for? If your using a 1.5" drain line, which can handle aprox 1200 gph, the overflow box should be about 14" wide. You are also using a pump rated at 900 gph before head loss which is alot less than the overflow can handle. I would worry about air getting trapped in the overflow because of the slow flow thru it and possibly causing some flooding.

So this is for a 75 gallon tank with a 50 gallon sump and a 20 gallon Fuge. The overflow box is 6 inches deep by 10 inches wide. I've heard some mixed things about drain pipe diameter. I designed my system using this page:

Bulkhead Flow Rate Art

where they tested overflow boxes with a lot of different diameter and lengths of pipes. According to this page, it looked like 1.5" was the proper diameter drain pipe to use. It would give me about 800 GPH, where this page showed 1" pipes giving 300-600 GPH, which looked too small. My overflow box has a hole for a 1" bulkhead now, but I was going to drill it out (although I haven't yet)

I have already ordered the 1.5" bulkhead (marine depot, probably not returnable?) and have bought the pipes and fittings for a 1.5" pipe from lowe's (returnable).

If using a 1.5" pipe is a bad idea, I could always eat the price of the $20 bulkhead and stay with a 1" pipe. Since I've ordered the bulkhead and bought the plumbing, I've had several people think I should be using a 1" instead of 1.5" (even though the link above looks to be well collected data to me, so I'm a bit confused on it all now.)

I would not be good to have issues with my overflow box overflowing though, so if needed I could stay with a 1" bulkhead...

Thanks
Rob

 

[jsoong]

It is OK to use the 1.5", since you have the valve in line. You can just turn the valve down part way to decrease the flow if needed.

I do this with mine to achieve quietness in the overflow. However, note that I do have a second emergency standpipe with my setup. It is set a bit higher than the main so is active only when there is a problem with the main drain. This is recommended when you place a valve in line as anything that block the valve may cause a flood.

 

[ccCapt]

Not to disagree with WetWebMedia, but I disagree with those #'s. Check out this Drain/Overflow Calculator and enter 600 gph and see what size pipe it recommends. I would just leave your overflow as is with the 1" drain line and go with 1" all the way. Your pump would work fine if everything was setup like your drawing and using 1" drain lines.

 

[jrgilles]

OK, I think I'll do that. 1" pipe is a lot easier to work with, and I would have more room in the overflow box for standpipe modifications to quiet noise. It looked like they had a lot of data on the WetWebMedia site, so I assumed it was good. No one seems to agree with their numbers though. Maybe something was weird with their experiment.

1" pipe will also make the plumbing a lot cheaper I'll downgrade the refuge flow then from 1" to 3/4 also, to keep things more in balance.

Thanks for the advice guys. I really appreciate the help. I'll try to return the favor to other users on the web site. I should have a much better understanding of it all once this tank is up and running

rob