melev
Plumbing: Drain lines to the sump and refugium
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, 01-29-2011 at 05:09 AM (17143 Views)
My 400g reef had five drains in the external overflow. They are equally spaced apart, and plumbing these into my sump was a little challenging. I'm sure I got a few gray hairs trying to come up with the perfect plan.
First of all, it needed five Durso Standpipes. All five are 1.5" black PVC going into 1.5" bulkheads. The drainlines are 1.5" as well.
Each Durso is drilled with a 3/16" hole in the cap to vent the drain. None of the Durso Standpipes were glued. They are pressed together and pressed into the Slip/Slip bulkheads. Each one was carefully measured to make sure they were all exactly the same height to assure all drains run at the same rate.
Rigid black PVC was plumbed beneath each bulkhead, and then a 45" degree fitting was glued beneath to angle the drains into the sump. At this point, the drains reduce to 1", so I had to paint a few more fittings. Plus, I seemed to be lacking a few parts and had to paint some. I tried to get all the parts in black because it would look great, and knew they would hold up better than painted parts, but when you run out and don't want to wait for more to arrive in the mail, it's time to Do It Yourself.
The three center drains feed the bubble tower in the skimmer section, and the two outer drains feed the refugium zone.
In this picture, can you spot my mistake?
I forgot to slide the collar of a union fitting on, so I quickly removed that section of SpaFlex pipe before it was bonded permanently and fixed my blunder.
The blue tape denotes the 1" mark. When gluing parts into sockets, measuring how deep the socket is first is important. By marking the pipe temporarily, you can see if you've pushed the piece in far enough and can also see if it is starting to come back out. Especially with SpaFlex, it's important that each joint is fully inserted and stays that way as it sets up.
To keep the one drain fitting in place in the refugium, I used some acrylic rod to create a small holder. It was the only one that needed such an attachment.
The other drain stayed where it belonged.
Here's all five drains.
The reason for the three unions in the middle is so I can loosen those three pipes to move them over to the filter sock. Occasionally, I'll run the sock during a big cleaning session or the day before I take pictures. Knowing that the SpaFlex will only harden over time, having a way to disconnect them to reorient them where I need them was important. I'm hoping this will work. I'd thought of an alternative running twice as much plumbing and opening and closing valves but decided that was going to be a problem over time as detritus collected in the shut off pipes.
For the bubble tower, I wanted to try something different. I've always used live rock rubble to break up microbubbles, but had purchased a nitrate reducing product from Seachem called Matrix that was collecting dust in my garage. Matrix helps remove nitrate from the water, purportedly.
While some of the rocks were bigger than others, they were coming out of the bubble tower's holes. I cut out some egg crate and fit them inside the tower, then placed the bigger Matrix rocks in the tower first. Once that layer was in place, I added more media, trying to use larger bits as well as smaller ones. I'm sure this will work out fine, except for the poor fish that finds its way down into my sump. They are going to have to either get lucky and hit one of the two drains going to the refugium or jump out of the tower. My preference would be that they stay in the display area.
I'm heating up the water in the poly tank tonight to get it ready for the big move this weekend.
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