14ft trench tank, water movement?

[PokerG]

I have a wall in my shed that I am hoping to put a tank stretching all the way across. Not a big tank in terms of volume but the tank itself will hopefully measure 15"H x 12"D x 14ft L.

It would be a FOWLR with a school of small fish, anthias or similar, and maybe a few other fish but nothing over 5" allowing plenty of room for turning around. My question is this:

How do I provide water movement in a tank like this?

I could put Tunze's at either end as I don't like the idea of having lots of pipework going all the way along. I am worried about keeping everything moving as it will be BB and heavily skimmed. I don't really want a big wave going from one side to the other so it can't be too powerful.

Do you think the Tunze's will be enough, especially using the less powerful ones so that I don't any Anthias surfing a 1ft wave at the top?

Can you think of anything else that might cause problems in a tank like this?

Thanks,

Gary

 

[BeanAnimal]

Closed loop with outputs hidden in rock work, all pointing in one direction in front of the rock and the reverse direction behind the rock.

In other words, build a lazy river type of flow. You could incorporate 4 mid size closed loop pumps (or more, say 6 or 8 small eheims...). hooked to the manifolds. Half for 1 direction, half for the other.

By putting them on timers, you could vary the current in the trench to simulate the tide moving in and out of the trench.

Something like

tide1 in on
tide1-2 in on
tide1-2-3 in on
tide1-2 in on
tide1 in tide1 out on
tide1-2 out on
tide1-2-3 out on
etc.

The flow would go from very gentle at peak and low tides, to extremely swift during the middle of the tide change.

Just a thought. I guess this could be done with the tunze units as well.

Fish tank in a shed huh?

 

[tabndust]

closed loop

 

[PokerG]

Are you guys chosing Closed Loops because you don't think the Tunze's will work? Why do you prefer the CL?

Gary

 

[Ira NZ]

I've thought about something similar(Not that I have the room) and what I think I'd like to do is have two BIG pumps on closed loops. One sucking water from the left and blowing from the right, the other sucking right blowing left. And have the pumps alternate on a couple minute cycle. That way all the water in the tank moves back and forth like waves.

That tank would be 130 gallons so according to my calculations if you had a pair of sequence darts you could get all the water to flow from one end to the other in about 2 minutes. Give you water speed of an awesome...Err... .08 miles per hour.

Now that I do the calculations, I don't think that kind of current would be enough...