Well I wanted to share another thing that may not qualify as a problem, but is definately an opportunity for improvement... I've been a big fan of Rio HyperFlow pumps in the past - they are cheap, they move tons of water, they don't give off much if any heat, and they are lower in wattage than every other comparable pump (Mag drive, GenX, etc.). Their one major flaw has been that the operate with a fair amount of noise, which I have attributed to vibration - and herein lies the issue. My return line plumbing is all hard plumbed with schedule 40 PVC, and is mounted to the walls inside my "fish closet". The vibration from the Rio pump is resulting in a lot of vibration in the return lines, and since they are mounted to the walls, it is causing vibration in the walls. Enough that since the return plumbing is on the underside of my stairs, you can feel it through your feet and hear a low, but audible hum. I ended up using a 2 foot section of vinyl tubing that connects directly from the pump to the mounted PVC line in hopes that it would absorb and reduce some of the vibration, but it did not improve things much if at all. I've also tried loosening the mounting brackets on the PVC and tyring both foam, towels, and felt tabs in between the pipe and the wall, but again, none of this resolved the issue.
Rather than continuing a trial and error approach to quiet the noise and vibration, I think I will now focus my attention on the root cause of my annoyance, which is the inherent quality of the return pump. I think it might be better to replace this pump with something of a higher quality that does not cause issues like this. I'm open for suggestions, but based on my layout right now, I'm going to continue to be limited to submersible pumps.
