Cali Kid Corals

Tank drain diffuser

Gorm

Guest
Every since I have had my tank one thing has been bothering me, how to lessen the gurgle of water coming from my tank. I have probably spent over $100 hacking up PVC to try different configurations. I throttle back my pump from roughly 900 gph to what might be 200 now. That has made the most difference, but caused me to add additional pumps to my tank for movement. I have tried bags, which work great for about 3 days then they become clogged. My current setup has helped somewhat with the noise, but now I get a ton of salt creep from the bubbles, and the area I have setup for the water return, now looks like an open air skimmer. Anyone have any suggestions? I would be willing to try anything at this point, and have a full tool resource to get it done. Thanks-

Gorm
 
Is this the drain line that is causing all the noise?

There is no real answer or at least no easy one. I have a 58g tank and I run a mag 9.5 as a return pump. The drain is awful loud. I have the drain (flexible one inch black tubing) submerged in the water. It is submerged about two to three inches from the water's surface; however it creates another problem namely splashing.

You think you're fixing one problem to create another problem.

So to fix the splashing problem. I have extra acrylic which sits at an angle from the edge wall of the sump to edge of the first baffle. The acrylic sits at an angle to curb the splashing, and so any remaining water will just drain back to the sump.
 
You kinda hit on something I was going to try, basically making a waterfall wall. I currently have several pieces of 1" PVC with a table saw blade width taken out of the bottom every 1/8 or so. I was going to take that at a 45 degree angle and mount it to a piece of acrilic. That way it runs down the acrilic, letting air escape and hopefully cutting back on the splash. I might even try a variation of this with a piece of stryofaom attached to the bottom to utilize the length of space availible in my sump. Or I guess I could hard pipe the same thing. Well time for some more trial and error I guess
 
It's not so much of a waterfall wall as a splash guard (think mudflaps on a truck).

The water splashes basically rusted out the hinges on the door <grumble, grumble>.
 
What I do is this;

1) My drain line is vinyl hose, which goes from the drain then connects to some PVC, a 90 degree bend brings the flow to the left of my sump to where my skimmer secion is.
2) At that point, the drain is now pretty much horizontal, with a slight downward slope.
3) that piece hits a PVC tee, with the other openings of the tee pointer up and down.
4) On the UP part of the tee, I put yet another tee, so it looks like the vent at the top of your house with a rain guard
5) The submerged side of the first tee is submerged.

This helps a lot and is sort of like your "waterfall/splashguard" idea.

Basically what happens is that the drainwater comes out sideways and hits the T where water and air goes up and down. The splash that is going upwards hits another T (with the other openings going sideways). This blocks many splashes and bubbles (even more if you connect this T to PVC that gives it more height). The water, of course, goes downwards and underwater, so it's not as loud or splashy as an open connection.

It works great for me, and I've tried different variants, but the idea is the same...divert the water sideways, then smash it into a T so that water can go DOWN and air/splash can go UP. The UP side has a splash/sound guard and the DOWN side is submerged and discharges water. You can try perforating the submerged part too.

Id does make the top part sort of like an "open air skimmer" like Gorm said, but it doesn't cause any problems for me.

I'd take a pic, but the sides of my sump have stuff growing all over them and that section is cramped with the skimmer output sitting on top of the drain part!

Oh, and my hinges are mostly rusty too, even though I attempted to paint them!

Also, to make life easier, I painted the entire inside of the cabinet with white primer so that light would reflect around in there and make things easier to see.


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