New sump...Niagra Falls noise! ;-)

synack

New member
I built a sump out of a 30L AGA tank. The sump is 16" high with three chambers. Left to right I have the pipe from the tank with rock, then a skimmer chamber at center, and then the return pump in the rightmost chamber and a bubble trap in-between.

The leftmost baffle is 14" high and the right side is 9" and then 6" for the bubble trap. Anyway, the issue I'm having is that the water falling from chamber to chamber is extremely loud. Are there any good ways to silence this? I was thinking of putting in slanted acrylic to the right of each baffle with a big drop so that water would slope into the next chamber instead of falling a few inches. Any recommendations on how to address this?

Thanks
 
Reduce flow rates, or reduce the differences in baffle heights. IME there's no reason to have such large differences in water level from section to section unless you have equipment with vastly different needs - and since it sounds like the skimmer is the only equipment in the sump, you can just run the whole thing at the height the skimmer needs (assuming that provides enough head room when the system drains down.)
 
The left chamber is so high just to help with the water/air turbulence from the tank overflow. The rest of the sump can be at 9" and be fine.

I did throttle the return pump a lot to help with the noise. But I'd like to have a bit more flow.
 
If the baffles are acrylic, you could remove them easily and notch them much like a snail guard on an overflow. An alternative would be drill holes in the top inch of each baffle.

Another option is to place a bag of carbon on the fall side of the baffle to soften and further disperse the falling water. Wont be a bad thing to add some carbon, but does create another area of maintainence.
 
Back
Top