Hey Alan...things are coming along VERY nicely...love how you stacked and plumbed your storage tanks. Can you provide any details on how your surge device will work?...is this a DIY type device? What is your timeline for being able to add livestock?
Thanks Jeff. The storage tanks are nice to have with the gravity feed. No more messing with pumps, at least for the refill side now. I also made that 2" PVC end that goes into the sump movable, so it can rotate back and allows me to fill separate containers from the bottom 100g stock tank (ex. 5g bucket for changing QT water). Like this:
My plan is to add all the fish over the July 4th weekend. I'll start moving the corals into the DT as soon as the aquascaping is complete and the surge device is figured out (Don't want to blow everything over).
Jon came over on Saturday to help mess with the surge device. We started with 5g, 10g, and 15g surges using a rubbermaid tote and 2" PVC. This was all dumped into the sump with manually releasing the surge, just to see what it was like. The surge was pretty awesome in those tests, even with the smaller volumes. However, it was a little harder to see in the stock tank. I had an old Lifereef 8-9g acrylic sump from a prior system that was just sitting on the shelf, so I decided to drill it and use it for the surge device on the DT. We built a shelf out of 2x12s to hang from the floor boards and got it set up about 2-3 feet above the tank. The first couple tests were simple drains and released manually when the surge tank was full. The effect was really nice, but there were tons of bubbles. I went ahead and put together a siphon u-tube to automate the surge, but couldn't ever get it to work. Starting from empty, the water would rise up about 1" from the top of the u-tube piece, oscillate for a little bit, then steady out and just sit 1/2 way up the u-tube piece. I'm not 100% sure why it wasn't working, but I suspect that it was because the feed pump wasn't supplying water fast enough to put enough flow/pressure through the u-tube to create the siphon. It basically was just falling over the inside of the u-tube at the same rate as the feed pump. I gave up on messing with it Saturday night and figured I would test out the toilet flush valve method today. I went and picked up a Fluidmaster 507 kit and a float valve. I was able to attach the kit with a 2" threaded adapter into the bulkhead and hooked the float onto the plastic chain. I figured this would be easy to get going, but I also had problems with this setup. The water would rise up and the float would pull the flapper up just enough to create a little gap and let the incoming water flow out. It would just sit there like this with the flapper almost ready to pop open, but leaking water out the gap. Pulling up on the float/chain just a little would make it go, but I could never get it to run automatically
I'll probably mess with it again this week.
Here is a video:
