Drum Roll Please...... 8000 gallon tank build

[GoBigOrGoHome]

Kensilvey: Thanks for the kind words. Located ~15 miles northeast of green bay.

Randy: You are completely right on the contact time issue. That's why having the screens at a 10% incline would be better to keep the flow rate through the algae pretty slow. I like the idea that I can probably run 500gph over the screen consistently and that would be just right to achieve optimal N and P removal. If the screen were a total of 12 feet wide (3x4), then I would probably need somewhere around 3000 gph to produce the same effect. I do see the benefit from the smaller footprint and the added convenience of cleaning though. In your opinion, what would be the best way to go about lighting the inside walls on your design? My one thing here is that we've already got the shelving, so we might as well use it. I think my inclined design would be better for surging as well, as I can't really see any way of creating a surge on a vertical screen. The question is, then, how much efficiency do you lose if you don't have the surge? Estimates have been ~50%. I think that I might try both designs on a smaller scale, if I can come up with some extra cash in the next month or so. We'll see.

 

[SWaquariast]

K. I just excited to see were this goes its such a cool project.

 

[GoBigOrGoHome]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13990863#post13990863 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by SWaquariast
K. I just excited to see were this goes its such a cool project.

Let me put this into a mathematical perspective for you:

My excitement>>>>>>> your excitement :lol:

we are all really excited about this build, and I, too, am interested to see where it goes... I don't really know exactly how its all going to go either.

 

[One Dumm Hikk]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13990810#post13990810 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by GoBigOrGoHome

Randy: You are completely right on the contact time issue. That's why having the screens at a 10% incline would be better to keep the flow rate through the algae pretty slow.

I think if you test it you will find that you will have to speed the flowrate up so that the algae at the end of the chain doesn't starve to death. You will have to flow it faster on the long run and shorter on the short run to keep the contact time in its optimal range.

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13990810#post13990810 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by GoBigOrGoHome

I like the idea that I can probably run 500gph over the screen consistently and that would be just right to achieve optimal N and P removal. If the screen were a total of 12 feet wide (3x4), then I would probably need somewhere around 3000 gph to produce the same effect.

I think you will find that the water flow will be the same irregardless of the configuration of the screens. The main difference would be recirculating (small footprint) versus not having it recirculated to give the dwell time. If you run it down 4 feet, you have to recirc it 5 times to get it across 20 feet of algae.
So instead of, say, 3000gph down a 20 feet incline, you would have 600gph recirculate the water 5 times to get the dwell time. Either way, I think the total gph in the system will be the same if the surface area is the same.

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13990810#post13990810 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by GoBigOrGoHome
I do see the benefit from the smaller footprint and the added convenience of cleaning though. In your opinion, what would be the best way to go about lighting the inside walls on your design?

You aren't going to save any lighting with a vertical or horizontal position. It is still going to take the same amount of lighting. But, mount the lights vertically and attach them to the vertical panel so that when you turn the panel, the lights turn with it. The top would have to be setup on something similar to a shower head to allow it to turn easily (mostly the water lines), using locline or something similar. When you turned the vertical panel the second time, you would have to make sure you turned it the other way so that the wiring wouldn't get wrapped around it.

Use T5'es with SLR'es and get the bulbs from Home Depot.

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13990810#post13990810 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by GoBigOrGoHome My one thing here is that we've already got the shelving, so we might as well use it.

Use the shelving to sit frag tanks on to raise clams and xenia.

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13990810#post13990810 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by GoBigOrGoHome I think my inclined design would be better for surging as well, as I can't really see any way of creating a surge on a vertical screen.

Whether it is vertical or horizontal, you would have a spraybar type setup to put the water onto the screen. You would have a second spraybar that was for the surge. Hook it to a pump running a SCWD where the scwd fed opposing panels at a time. Then half of the system would be surging at any given time. It would take some tinkering to get the surge the way you wanted it.

With the horizontal orientation, you would use something like a Carlson Device to create the surge (easiest way) but they are noisy.

Otherwise, you would have to use a controllable pump (DC pump) to create the surge whether its horizontal or vertical. And controllable DC pumps aren't cheap.

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13990810#post13990810 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by GoBigOrGoHome
The question is, then, how much efficiency do you lose if you don't have the surge? Estimates have been ~50%. I think that I might try both designs on a smaller scale, if I can come up with some extra cash in the next month or so. We'll see.

I can't answer that one as I have never really read about it or thought about it. Testing would tell you. Testing will also be the only way to find out what kind of waterflow would be the best flowrate across the screens although that may be somewhere in Adeys writings on ATS'es in general.

 

[woodiecrafts]

I have the seen the surge type or at least what they call them, set up on a pivot or fulcrum more or less, but that is as far as it goes. I am not sure of the precentage of the efficiency of them. I have an algea tray set up on one of my 75's just up under the lip of the lighting and the water flows through it a steady rate and I can't keep the algea out of it. Of course that is what it supposed to do, but I couldn't actually tell you to what advantage it does other than to keep an incredible amount of excess pods in it for my mandarin.

 

[dgoth]

Wow, gobig! Sounds like a great project. Good luck. Looking forward to seeing some pics!

 

[reefergeorge]

I feel like I just wasted an hour of my time, and now my head hurts.
I'll be back when something is being built.

 

[GoBigOrGoHome]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13991278#post13991278 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by One Dumm Hikk
I think if you test it you will find that you will have to speed the flowrate up so that the algae at the end of the chain doesn't starve to death. You will have to flow it faster on the long run and shorter on the short run to keep the contact time in its optimal range.
If its all gravity feed, and I put 500gph up to the top, then by the time it reaches the bottom, it will still be flowing at 500gph. Gotta love gravity! I kind of doubt that the ATS would be so efficient that there would be nothing left by the end of the chain in the water for the turf algae to consume. If there is nothing, good! That's the goal, right? The thing is though, that there's no way that an 20x2' ATS will pull all the nutrients out of an 8000 gallon aquarium. Say the nitrate in the tank settles in at around 10 ppm (hypothetical). I guess I don't have any scientific evidence to back this, but I kind of doubt that the algae on this turf scrubber could pull out almost a gram/hour NO3 alone(more than a half gram anyway), along with other nitrogenous compounds in addition to phosphates in the water. Starvation shouldn't be an issue, but if it is, then the system is running well!



I think you will find that the water flow will be the same irregardless of the configuration of the screens. The main difference would be recirculating (small footprint) versus not having it recirculated to give the dwell time. If you run it down 4 feet, you have to recirc it 5 times to get it across 20 feet of algae.
So instead of, say, 3000gph down a 20 feet incline, you would have 600gph recirculate the water 5 times to get the dwell time. Either way, I think the total gph in the system will be the same if the surface area is the same.
My point there was that to get the same amount of water-algae contact time between the two systems, you would need a lot more flow, because your design involves a much shorter run, which may result in water that is not clean. Having a bare screen at the end of my scrubber would not be a problem, IMO, unless, of course, it was just cleaning the water that came through the scrubber, and left the nitrates running rampant in the DT, in which case, I would up the flow. The longer contact time that each gallon of water has with the ATS, the better, and I don't really see how I could recirculate the water like you're saying in a very efficient manner. Any suggestions??



You aren't going to save any lighting with a vertical or horizontal position. It is still going to take the same amount of lighting. But, mount the lights vertically and attach them to the vertical panel so that when you turn the panel, the lights turn with it. The top would have to be setup on something similar to a shower head to allow it to turn easily (mostly the water lines), using locline or something similar. When you turned the vertical panel the second time, you would have to make sure you turned it the other way so that the wiring wouldn't get wrapped around it.

Yeah, obviously for the same sq footage of algae, I should be using the same amount of light, but I guess I was just wondering if you had some type of grand master plan for putting VHO tubes right down inside the 'box' of screens with waterproof endcaps or something. You think overhead lighting would work for the inside of the screen though, huh? I think I mostly understand your overall design here, but there's a few things I'm confused on. With these things being mounted on dowels, they would just swing open like a door on hinges, right? And to avoid issues with the water lines, maybe they could just be stationary, and mounted above where the screens will go when not cleaning?

Use T5'es with SLR'es and get the bulbs from Home Depot.



Use the shelving to sit frag tanks on to raise clams and xenia.
I dont think you understand just how much shelving there is in this room :lol:



Whether it is vertical or horizontal, you would have a spraybar type setup to put the water onto the screen. You would have a second spraybar that was for the surge. Hook it to a pump running a SCWD where the scwd fed opposing panels at a time. Then half of the system would be surging at any given time. It would take some tinkering to get the surge the way you wanted it.
I'm not exactly feeling how a second spray bar would form a 'surge'. My surge would involve a reverse current coming up through the ATS boxes, causing the algae to reposition itself, so it's not always laying flat in the same position, allowing for photosynthesis and N and P removal on the entire surface of all the algae. I thing that with a surge, it's important to have cross currents and flow coming from different directions, not just moments of intermittent flow, and with your design, the flow can only move in one direction: downward. Maybe that's not a problem though.

With the horizontal orientation, you would use something like a Carlson Device to create the surge (easiest way) but they are noisy.
I wouldn't need a Carlson Surge device. I have a wave timer that can power 3 pumps up to 2 amps each intermittently, and that's what I plan to use.


Otherwise, you would have to use a controllable pump (DC pump) to create the surge whether its horizontal or vertical. And controllable DC pumps aren't cheap.



I can't answer that one as I have never really read about it or thought about it. Testing would tell you. Testing will also be the only way to find out what kind of waterflow would be the best flowrate across the screens although that may be somewhere in Adeys writings on ATS'es in general.

Disclaimer: Calculations above of nitrate removal are very rough ones based on a chemistry class from my sophomore year in high school.... ahh, molarity.

woodie: I think my surge system will be nearly as efficient and much less complicated than a fulcrum surge device.

dgoth: Thanks for the kind words. More pics will come soon!

reefergeorge: This thread has been going on for less than 3 weeks. Do you really expect all the issues to be ironed out and the 8000 gallon tank up and running within that time frame? The word crazy comes to mind...

 

[workinman6009]

Close in the top so you can look down on it. you will need something for the air to get out when you fill it, some kind of valve or cap or something, but then you could sit on the edge and look down on it like a big top viewer thing. Even better make it strong enough to walk on

 

[GoBigOrGoHome]

oh man, that would be sweet to be able to walk over it. As much as minimal surface agitation will limit gas exchange at the surface, I don't think we want to eliminate it completely by closing the surface off... what does everyone think on that? That would be so amazing, as there's an exhibit at the shedd aquarium where you walk over this clear sidewalk and theres a railing you can look over down into a ray tank, but it goes underneath you too, and sometimes the rays swim upside down basically right against your feet. It is so cool.

 

[customcolor]

just make a walkway in the top surface. walk up to the side of the tank then take a step down onto the walk way(with rails of corse ) and walk across. i say take a step down cuz the walk way will be in the water. the walk way will have sides on it to to keep the water where it is ment to be...



did i just open an idea???

 

[GoBigOrGoHome]

haha, you and workinman both. Something I'll definitely have to bring up to the uncle. Thats just a couple more sheets of 1" acrylic he'll have to buy, but no biggie. That would be very very interesting. Again, though, I would think that it would be best to keep the entire surface open, partially for gas exchange, and partially for heat exchange between the tank and the pool room. I really, really don't want to have to heat this thing, and if we do, then I don't want to have to raise the ambient temp more than a couple degrees. That would be extremely inefficient.

 

[Aquabucket]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13992370#post13992370 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by reefergeorge
I feel like I just wasted an hour of my time, and now my head hurts.
I'll be back when something is being built.

Unless you have some ideas or suggestions next time why bother?

A tank of this magnitude is going to take a quite a while to complete and require a great deal of planning and decisions. If anything this hobby should teach us is patience.

 

[customcolor]

i wasnt saying to cover the whole top just a 2' wide walk way, side to side or front to back. would be neat

 

[GoBigOrGoHome]

Yeah, I got ya on the walkway deal. I was thinkin side-to-side, which would be 2 more sheets of acrylic, and would consume close to 25% of the surface area. Not sure if that presents a major issue, but it would reduce air-water interface for sure.

 

[customcolor]

you could make it so you can drop it down when you want. also it would make it so you dont have to clean it all the time if its not in the water all the time. then your only air water mix will only be small some times but most of the time the mixture will be fine.


im tired now...... . . . . . . . . .

 

[GoBigOrGoHome]

Yeah, something to consider. I'll be going over to the house tomorrow sometime, and I'll make mention of it to him.

Solution to fatigue/exhaustion=sleep

 

[One Dumm Hikk]

With the ATS, you have to decide whether you want a large footprint on the system or a small one. If you take the large footprint, then you simply feed water over it. If you go with the smaller footprint, you have to make a trade off somewhere. With a short vertical screen instead of a long horizontal screen, you simply have to pump the water across it more times to get the same contact time. Its the same basic concept of a recirculating skimmer. Instead of a really tall skimmer to get contact time, you fed the water through multiple times to increase the contact time but it allows you to build a smaller filtration system. Footprint. And, as noted, its a penalty you pay for a smaller footprint is a pump to recirculate water to get your contact time back.

Not more flow though. Simply recirculating flow. If you have 500gph going across a 60 foot screen, and you shorten it to a 4' screen, you recirculate it at the same rate - 500gph- you just have to pump the water more times. Its a price you pay for the smaller footprint.

You could have the best of both worlds though. Instead of 3 screens that are 2x20, you could have 12 screens that were only 2x5 and stack them up. The surges in an ATS aren't reverse flow surges, they are surges of water. If the "regular" rate of water flow is 500gph, you add the surge where it dumps water over the system, the water level subsides back to normal, then you have another surge. The surge is in the same direction as normal water flow. Its mimicking waves breaking over a natural turf zone.

Lights, you stand them on end and mount them to the screens so that when you "turn" the screens to clean them, the lights come with it. It lets you put the lights a lot closer and still be able to turn them. The dowel would be in the center rather than on an end. So that when you turn it, you can turn it 180 degrees and it be in the same position as it started. If you hinged it on the edge of the panel, you open the "door" and scrape algae, wheres it going? Into the floor. If the panel turns completely around, the algae you scrape off goes into the bottom so it can be drained out instead of manually having to clean it up.

In the end, it may be easier to simply solid mount everything, have the panels where they will slide in/out for cleaning. Then, it wouldn't matter whether it was vertical or horizontal. When its time to clean, you simply pull a screen out, take it to a cleaning area, clean it, put it back in.

Spraybar: Imagine you had a pump pumping water into the ATS. It runs across the screens and drains out. Now, imagine a second - identical - pump running a SCWD device. If the outlets on the SCWD went across two different screens, then when the SCWD changed outlets, you would gain flow on one screen, lose flow on another. That creates the "surge" and very easily done. No DC pumps to worry with, no controllers to worry with, just a simple 40 dollar SCWD device. Simple, easy, and cheap.

Carlson or Fulcrum surge tank. If the surge tank was filled, via gravity, from the drain, when it got full it dumps and creates a "surge" for you. No pumps at all. Part of your gravity drain would be continuous flow across the ATS, part of the gravity drain would feed the surge. Simple, easy, and cheap.

 

[GoBigOrGoHome]

I see where you're coming from with the surge, but I'm not convinced that adding additional flow in the same direction is the same as a fulcrum surge tank falling. Granted, neither is reverse flow, but its a lot closer, as it will cause the turf algae to stand on end, then lay down in a different position. A surge, ideally, would create water movement in all directions, like a wave breaking on a rock that breaks the surface, where turf algae frequently grows in nature. Also, I'm really not seeing how 500 gph flowing over a 4-ft tall screen can possibly have the same filtration capacity as 500 gph flowing over a 20-ft screen. I mean, in theory, I suppose the lower water volume you'd be moving over the 12' width of your design versus the 2' width of my design would allow the water to be filtered almost as fully over a 4' length as over my 20' length, but I think you're reaching an efficiency barrier there, as that's barely 3 gph over each inch of scrubber screen, which would probably make the algae screen pretty dry overall, reducing its carrying capacity for turf. Not sure if I'm absolutely right here, and obviously 500 gph is just a theoretical number we're dealing with here, but do you see what I'm saying??

Also, got a pic of my uncle in the tank, and a couple more of plumbing today. More to come of the pool room and another pic of external plumbing on friday, I think.

http://s398.photobucket.com/albums/pp65/GoBigorGoHome_01/

 

[GoBigOrGoHome]

So at my uncle's house today, we discussed some things further on type of filtration and other means for set-up, and we got a few things accomplished. He seems to be on board with RDSB's, cryptic zones, a chain of fuges, and potentially an ATS. He says the people at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago encouraged him to flow 1 full tank volume through filtration per hour, but I was thinking more along the lines of 2.5-4. What does everyone think of that? I feel like 20,000 gph of surface skimming is a good goal to have, then with another 10,000 going through a closed loop, and 75-100,000 gph running as added circulation within the tank. As long as there's 100,000+ gph overall circulation in the tank, I think I can be happy with it. We also talked about including the water change reservoir as part of the tank's water volume, which would potentially bring total water volume to 10,000+ gph. Then, the topic of having a walkway over the top of the tank came up, and I will say he was anything but turned off by the concept. What does everyone think about having nighttime aeration in the DT with submerged moonlights? I feel like that would create a great shimmer effect.

That's about all for now. Hopefully we'll have a little more concrete info next week when we actually get a group of guys together to talk about it. Thanks, everyone, for your great input up to this point.