closed loop with out drilling.

E

enemec1

New member
I need help with a design of a CL with out draining and drilling my 210. As of now it has one CL on it but I would like to add another. I need sugestions and photos would be great. I want to put 4 returns along the front of the tank pointing toward the back wall of the tank.
thanks for looking and thanks for any help, Eric.
 
is your tank eurobraced?

if it is you can drill that to put in the bulkheads abd locline for the returns...

the inlets could be over the top...may be even able to hide them in the overflow boxes if they are deep enough..couple down sides to that though would be...surface skimmer the tank only to blow it out the CL...and the overflow box may not be large enough to have the capacity for an inlet and the drain to the sump...
 
melevsreef.com has a nice closed loop on a smaller tank, but it'd work for your application because he didn't drill. With that big of a tank you probably have a center brace. Just run one pipe over or under that (depending on how high your water level is) and tee it to the four out puts. Locline makes a perfect application with 1-2" adjustable hose that has 3/4" hoses coming off it. Check modularhose.com, somewhere on there.
 
I built a CL for my 75 and i used 1.5 just to get more surface area to drill holes in to lessen the suction in any one spot to keep critters from getting stuck to it.
 
Help:
I'm looking for pics and or design plans for a closed loop for my 30gl fish only with some live rock????????
 
Here is the one I had on my old 10gal. it ran on a mag7 with scwd...worked great...side to side flow changed every 10 seconds.<br>

IM000647.jpg
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IM000658.jpg
 
I tried an over-the-top CL using an Eheim 1262 driving a SCWD and had problems with microbubbles from cavitation, using 1.5" plumbing. I played around with it a bit, but eventually gave up and went to the controllable Tunze Nanostreams -- more expensive, but more efficient and controllable. YMMV.
 
I was going to add a closed loop to my 300 in a smilliar way by bring the pipe up from the taank and into the canopy then down the back and into the stand...

After weighing out the options i have decided to go with powerheads, a few cords in the water seemed cleaner then a mile of 1" pipe going everywhere...
 
First if you are setting up a closed loop for a large tank like that I would use something like a Dart pump. A few hundred gph would be much easier to do with some powerheads than a closed loop.

If you go with a real closed loop like a dart I would use a 2 inch intake for the pump. Just go up and over to the top of the tank down to the pump. For the actual water inlet, fill 12 inchs of the 2 inch pipe with 1/4 inch holes and cap the bottom to keep it from sucking up to much sand. Then from the pump run 2 inch pipe until you start Tee'ing it then bring it down to 4 inch outlets in the tank.

Kim
 
If you do go forward with it, be sure to build in an easy way to prime the siphon overflow -- not many pumps will self-prime in that situation.
 
If this is done this way up and over with pvc where can I get black pvc. white will look bad against the black back ground that I have.
 
If you are worried about the color. Use some krylon Fusion paint to paint the PVC before it is installed. Besides that you will get coralline algae coving it pretty quickly if it is in the light.

Kim
 
I was thinking about doing the same thing in my 180 and putting the returns in the overflow, if the overflow could handle it
 
Using your overflow for a closed loop is not a good idea. First you are increasing the flow over the overflow, so you are cutting back on quality of the surface skimming. Second that "bad" water that you just skimmed off of the surface to go to your skimmer is being pumped back into the bulk water. Third the overflow will be a lot noisier because of the amount of water flowing over it and it will be hard to keep bubbles from dropping down to your closed loop intake.

Kim
 
I used 1" pvc for my plumming.

My intake is over the side beside my overfow to help hide it.
I capped the end, drilled about 100 3/16th inch holes the hole way around up and down the intake, and painted it black with krylon paint.

I use an external pump rated for about 1300 gph. and put a sea-swirl on the end. It is mounted in the center on the back.

Love it! :)

BTW...I also have 2 vor-techs located on each side. They create a very random, turbulent flow when they cross the CL flow.

Toal flow in my 180: about 9000 gph.
 
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