Want to add sump to my 14 gallon, plans inside, need input please!

[badbread]

So I have this extra 10 gallon tank just sitting around in my place and I want to do something with it. Seeing that my little 14 gallon is so little and has such little water volume, and the amount of stuff hanging off the back and stuffed into the rear chambers is ridiculous, I want to add this 10 gallon as a sump.

Here's the catch, the tank is up on a kitchen counter and there is nowhere underneath it to do the traditional gravity fed siphon option. There could be a bunch of room behind the tank though, so I thought why not do a pump water up and let gravity take it down to the tank.

Here's the plan:
• Standard 10g AGA tank elevated about 6-7" off the counter
• Drill a hole in the top corner of it and install a bulkhead. This will be the return
a. Failure point 1, if something blocks this bulkhead, shit could get really ugly, strainer and religious checking of it to be sure it never gets clogged
• Place a smallish pump into chamber one of the BC chambers and pump it up to the opposite side of the fuge tank. This will be the feed line.
a. Another failure point, if the power goes out and this line is submerged to deep in fuge, the siphon will flood the display. Plan being to keep this line above the water line
b. Label D in the pictures is a pane that is completely sealing off where the feed line ... uhm... feeds so in case something happened the entire sump would not empty out through the feed line

Flow would go something like this:

Feed pump in Chamber 1 of Biocube up to sump -> water spills over first glass pane which covers length of the tank-> zig zags through 3 other glass panes and into flow into main refuge area -> water then flows under label E -> water returns to tank through bulkhead.

Will this work? What can I do better? What did I miss? What size bulkhead would be best?

 

[badbread]

Damnit my piksure is messed up... D and A should be swapped positions.

 

[badbread]

Aww man, is it that bad of an idea?

 

[A_Lee]

Looks like you're trying to build a nuclear power plant

 

[fishnfst]

Is it possible for you to drill the back of your 14g? I've had wet dry's that would sit on teh same stand as the display tank . The display tank would be high enough for a bh drilled to drain directly into the wet dry.. The pump up and let the water flow back down systems are very popular all over asia with freshwater tanks. They kinda remind me of those old pond filters. Just a big box with different types of filter media. A pump would pump water up into the filter then it would drain back to teh display through the bulkheads

 

[sfsuphysics]

for my temporary softy tank I pump up to my sump refugium.

Doesn't work quite as well because there isn't any surface skimming, but it still works. Plus your design looks like it incorporates surface skimmer since you're pumping from the internal sump/chambers. The downside is you have an ugly sump in plain view

 

[adolfo425]

It will work but like Mike said it would look ugly with all the equipment in plain site. One way you can fix that is if you made the front half of the fuge tank into a display and the back half into a sump that might make it look better.

 

[Roc]

Jay that tank looked really good when I was over there, why do you want mess with it?

 

[cwolfus]

[quote author=Roc link=topic=6979.msg90964#msg90964 date=1237661717]
Jay that tank looked really good when I was over there, why do you want mess with it?
[/quote]

+1

I haven't seen Jay's tank, but I think there is much to said for simplicity - especially when it is already working!

 

[badbread]

Thanks Roc, it's been through the ringer since then. I have a terrible hair algae problem in the tank. I've completely stopped feeding (except a few pellets for the fish and shrimp), added a phosphate reactor, cut back the lights and I'm still having an issue. On top of that my KH and calc are dropping very fast in the tank and there is no easy economical way for me to dose in this tank at the present time. I figure the added water volume would help. I'm going to try it out and see what happens, how it looks, etc... I like DIY'ing so it should be a fun little project.

What size bulkhead should I use?

 

[badbread]

So I went forward with it and put a little something together.

Instead of the glass 10 gallon I got an acrylic 10g truvue.

Drilled out a 1 1/2" inch hole with a hole saw and went to work:

I simulated a power outage, the pump in the display tank turning off, the sump pump only turning off and all tests went well. no flooding and about 3/4 - 1 gallon of "extra" space if need be. The only failure point being the return line getting clogged... It was so easy to drill the hole I'm thinking of adding another 3/4" "oh shit" bulkhead just to be extra safe.

Right now I have a maxi-jet 600 pumping up into it running at about 3/4 power, if I crank it up all the way the water level in the "sump" in the display gets to low. I still have a lot of tweaking to do, I guess you could call this a proof of concept. My awesome neighbor who has a wood shop in his garage built the stand for me in about an hour. I went over to his place looking for some scrap wood and came home with a nice little stand about an hour later.

What's next?

1. Make the stand pretty
2. Get plumbing supplies (instead of using the phosphate reactor ones)
3. Plan how baffles are going to be placed in the tank
4. Plan lighting, I was thinking a couple CFL's for Chaeto
5. Figure out how to fit Tunze 9002 and phos reactor in there
6. Figure out where to drill and/or mount the iceprobe chiller

 

[adolfo425]

Looks good there Jay.

Adolfo

 

[adam12]

i did something similar for an old small tank i had at work.

what i ended up doing was basically making an oversized HOB - pumped water out to the sump and just let it flow back in. i got creative with some plexi scrap and a heat gun and made a little overflow spout and stuck it on the side(top) of the sump under a wide hole...

 

[badbread]

Thanks Adolfo.

Adam, I guess it is just a massive HOB... Didn't think of it that way until someone mentioned it in chat last night.

So I left it running last night and this morning there was a very thin line of water coming from the bulkhead outside of the tank. I hand tightened the bulkhead as much as I could as I was told and read that you don't want to tighten the bulkhead to much. The line was all dried up and was basically a line of dried up salt then went down the whole side of the tank. There was a tiny tiny tiny drop of water under it but that's it. Should I seal it somehow? The glass-holes website mentions something about a silicon plumbers sealant or grease or something...

Thanks!

 

[LeviT]

Have you done a power outage test just to make sure any reverse siphoning doesn't cause an overflow?

 

[badbread]

I have, I tripped the GFCI and all went well. I have the feed line just barely above the water line so there's no reverse siphon. When i finalize it I would like to use some sort of small filter sock or something, so I was going to drill a hole in the feed line to make sure that doesn't happen.

 

[Roc]

Jay what I would do since it's so accessable is loosen up the bulkhead and apply a bead of silcon caulk under the bulkhead tighten bolt, then retighen, this has worked for me in the past.

 

[badbread]

Sounds good, I'm going to drain it out tonight and begin making it look pretty and stuff. Thanks for the tip!

 

[badbread]

Did A-LOT of work tonight on the tank.


[*]Drilled a 3/4" "oh shit" bulkhead just to be that much more careful (I really don't want to have to use my renters insurance)
[*]Bought and installed a 3/4" PVC ball valve, 3/4" TFP to 3/4" barb connectors for the feed line instead of using the phos reactor one

[*]Added baffles and used weld on to weld them into place
[*]Bought a minijet 400 to use on the phos reactor and hooked it up (perfect flow BTW)

Bought and installed a filter sock, had to cut it down to size but it's working very nicely and no more microbubbles!

Bought these 2 things, used an old extension cord I had, cut a little piece out of the stock hood the tank came with and made this Fuge light. It actually covers up the phosphate reactor perfectly. I had to score and snap a piece of the stock acrylic cover for the light. The hottest part of the hood gets 135 degrees which is warm to the touch. That isn't to hot is it? If so, I have a little fan I think I could install in there.

Hood off:

Hood on:

Installed the Tunze 9002 skimmer... It sits a bit below where it should, I need to shave about 1/8" from one of the top braces to make it fit perfectly. I'm hoping that doesn't mess up the bracing, I was just going to take a dremel to it. I planned the first baffle where it is so the skimmer magnet could mount onto it, and to my disbelief I actually did it right!

 

[A_Lee]

Holy moly! Great progress you've made!