After Marti put in here Calfo Overflow with external Durso's I was dieing to do one. I tried to build this one with some glass that my daughter had given me but it was way to thick for me to cut and would have weighed a ton so I used what was left of a piece of acrylic that I had. I used Weld On 3 to glue the Acrylic and Weldon 16 in the joints of the Acrylic to Acrylic bonds. I used two part bonding agent to bond the Acrylic to the back Glass. After reading on the internet this seemed like it would provide the best bond and it worked great. I did follow up with a bead of silicone around it to seal though. I was pleased with the two part glue and will use it again when bonding Acrylic to Glass.
Why are the 2 lower returns so low? Are you going bare bottom on this tank? Nice job on the overflow.
I am not a fan of bare bottom tanks and left them far behind in the mid 90's when it was popular. They have made a bit of a come back, Scuba Dog is using that setup on his twin 180's. The tank will have a plenum and yes the returns will be below the substrate level.
If you have a overflow is it going to a sump or a fuge? If it is dumping into a fuge you could you use a dsb and have the same effect? Is there a advantage to using it?
Here is a link to the 100 gallon sump that is in my basement so that you can get a clearer picture of the setup. http://www2.razorbackreef.com/old/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=827 Now that you mention it, you are correct, it wouldn't matter whether the plenum was in the sump or the main tank, it would provide the same benefits. But b/c the sump is so shallow I really don't have the height to afford the 5 to 6 inches that is required for the plenum which I do have in the 90 gallon display tank. All things being perfect, it would be better to have it in the sump. Regardless I will definitely reap the benefits of having the increased surface area of the substrate that is in the sump that I have seen in systems like the one that Beanhead is running where his 75 gallon display is only a fraction of the water volume of the system. This affords him alot of stability with his tank and I am looking for the same effect. It is a bit of a departure from the normal desire to have a display tank as big as possible. But seeing small tanks that are stable and growing coral are as much as an accomplishment as having large display tanks that lack the foundation for good water quality, in my eyes.
How much substrate do you put on top of the plenum? If you use a DSB instead of a plenum, 4 - 6 inches is all you need. Seems to me that the plenum just wastes space.
what size pump are you going to have to use for 14+ ft of head space? And is it going to pump straight into all 4 oulets at the same time? Internal or external pump? How low are you going to run the water in the sump to account for all of the water in the drain and pump sides?
The pump is a Baldor (Sequence) 1000 series that pumps about 4000 gallons an hour with a 23 foot head. The return for the Calfo overflow is over the tank. the four returns that have lock line on them are a closed loop run by a Sequence Dart that is plumbed into a Ocean Motion Super Squirt. The water level in the sump is 9 inches and the remaining 3 inches comes out to around 20 gallons of room for over flow - much more than I will need.
I got the external durso overflows put together this evening. They came out rather well, I always anticipate some major screw up for stuff like this that I have never done before. None that I see at the moment , but feel free to enlighten me if you see anything. Still quite a ways to go but it is getting there.
Joe - it is the tank that I got from you. Looks a bit different now - huh. I just got through completing the pumbing through the holidays and went in today to make sure all of the unions are secure - all 11 of them. Not to mention the 11 bulk heads that I have in the hole system. It is a good think that I did because one of the 1" bulkheads and one of the 1 1/2" bulkheads were missing the o-ring from them. I guess that with so many being put in at the same time a got careless and lost some of them or Tucker could have chewed them up if they fell on the floor. He is usually helping me when I work on the aquariums.
nice plumbing job, If I had it to do over I would have gone with the externial dursco instead of the stockman, I think it looks a lot cleaner. Are you planning on all the flow from the dart going thru the super squirt? I went with the snapper because the squirt is rated for 2500gph, but I'm not getting as much flow as I wanted and still had to add a a few PH's to get the flow I wanted. Just courious of how the Dart would work.
I will have some pictures of everything running tomorrow. I can't imagine that the dart that I am running into the super squirt will not have enough flow, it just amazes me that you had to add power heads. I have gone to alot of trouble to add a closed loop to such a small tank and will be really pissed off if after 5 extra bulkheads for the closed loop I don't have enough flow. I will let you know. Schiller Street Reef posted on Fisher12's name.
I would think the dart would give plenty of flow, if the squirt doesn't restrict it. with the squirt rated for 2400 gph and the snapper I bought was rated at 2500gph by the time I added all the elbows to set up an alternating current I feel I'm only getting around 1600 gph out of it. I'm shooting for around a 30x turnover rate for my sps. I know stting up this closed loop was a real pain, I have some pics set up of my plumbing nightmare on photobucket it's http://s257.photobucket.com/albums/hh212/ALMENO/tank if you want to take a look. if the dart works out I may look at getting a bigger pump, since the whole idea for the closed loop was to do away with the power heads.
Ameno - Here is a new thread that I started that has a you tube video of the ocean motion that I just set up. http://www2.razorbackreef.com/old/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=5271#5271
Here is the completed External Durso's on the the Left side of the tank. I didn't have much room to take a picture so that is why the whole back is not in the picture. You can also see the left upper and lower returns for the closed loop. The second picture is the center Durso of three and the Super Squirt just to the right of it.
I had to take the hood off of the aquarium and finally got a decent picture of everything. You can tell alot more about what goes where. I put 1/2 inch valves on the top of each durso but this was not enough intake to keep them from dumping every 30 seconds so I removed the center valve all together and this was perfect. Even with the center valve completely out if I close either of the two outside valves at all I go right back to the dumping of water through the durso's, so I must be at the bare minimum. So the upshot of this is if you make durso's out of 1 1/2 inch pvc and want to put a valve in it the largest that they have at Home Depost are still to small.
