"pressurised" Sump Build

[RipSlider]

Hello.

right now the build of my marine tank is on hold while I deal with a lot of teething issues and set up my FW, but an idea has been suggested that might solve most of them.

One of my main issues is making the tank itself quiet, as it's in my office, and right now it's pretty noisey, most of it is water fallin over the weir and guggling down the large diameter pipes.

What I'm wondering is if I can do away ith the weir and thick pipes.

Would it be possible to have a matched pair of pumps, and have one of these pumps in the tank itself, pumping out water down a narow diameter pipe to the sump. The other side of the pair would be in the return section of the sump pumping back in again.

I can see that there would be issues regarding reliability if one pump broke, but the tank will be computer controlled, so I could get the other pump to shut down as well within less than a second in the event of failure.

It SEEMS like a workable idea, but I'm really aware that virtually all tanks are gravity fed, so I'm thinking I may have missed something.

Has anyone got any suggestions?

Thanks

Steve

 

[Matthew5664]

To reduce noises in the sump lengthen the feed into the sump so that it is below the water level. As for the weir: put a 90 deg. Ebow on it and turn it so its under water. this will help. For the baffles, have them at an angle so the water uses them like a slide instead of pouring over the edge.

 

[SkiFletch]

Well, you COULD do this, but you'd need to incorporate float switches and solenoid valves into the deign to make it work. The problem is, it is impossible to design a multi-pump system for flowing water between two open topped resevoirs. You need to match the flowrates of the two pumps EXACTLY and this just isn't possible.

If you really wanted, you could setup a crazy plumbinb circuit with a pump that pushes water from the display tank, through a solenoid valve that can either send water to the sump or back to the display tank. Then you'd have a float switch in probably the sump so that when the water level there gets too high the solenoid valve switches and recirculates through the display tank instead of pumping water down into the sump. Then when the sump water level gets too low the solenoid again switches flow back to the sump. All the while your pump inside your sump is pushing water up to the display tank constantly.

There are 3 issues at hand with designing this setup. #1, if power goes off, you need the solenoid to electrically default to tank-recirc so that you don't siphon into the sump. #2, You're relying on solenoids and float switches which are inherently unreliable over the long run and suceptible to problems with salt creep and inverts getting caught up in them. #3, Finding solenoids of the right size that are made out of plastic only is difficult. Metals (even stainless steel) will corrode over time and cause them to fail in a saltwater environment.

I'd try the suggestions Matt offered first though cause they're pretty easy

 

[Aquascaper]

Look into 'Durso' standpipes for the overflow method, this will help reduce noise (basically what Matt said). As Skifletch points out, matching the two pumps exactly would be impossible as they would vary during operation (for example if a snail crawled over the intake, partially blocking it and thus reducing the flow, or a piece of algae grows on the intake).

It is very seldom that a major breakthrough comes about in the marine hobby (when it does its usually big news so you'll hear about it) so the reason things are done a certain way is more often than not because that is the only reliable way to do it. That is not to say that people shouldn't experiment, how else would the breakthroughs come about, but there's some things you just can't change