What about a herbie overflow? Just have a straight pipe sticking up and drill a hole for a other bulkhead into the back of the tank that goes into the overflow? The straint pipe takes all your water (gate valve to adjust with precision) and you put a 90 on the new bulkhead and that's your emergency. The 90 can be high up and straight pipe can end halfway between bottom and the 90. I did this check my build thread. I drilled into the side of an external overflow but same idea.

never drilled glass before, and the tank is probably 1/2" glass all around. not to mention im not buying bits just to drill one hole...is there another option?

I'm not sure but that's what I'd do. If you ask around I'm sure you can find someone to drill it for a few beers or something. I gave Tony (Delphinus) a t-shirt and a slap on the ass. Glass was 1/2" and he got'er done!

oh dear :S i dunno if I can live up to a tshirt and slap on the ass....

A cheater way is to not use a bulkhead.... if you get a male threaded 1.5" PVC fitting, a flemale one and a soft O-Ring you can make a bulkhead out of it pretty easy. Cut the female threaded fitting off to use it as a tightening nut, and now you have a 1.5" PVC fitting in a 1.5" hole. 1.5" can flow 1200+GPH pretty easy, I was getting 1200+ on mine when it was duroso, now much more as herbie. Specs say 1600GPH, with gravity feed.

not sure i understand what you said at all lol im a newbie with plumbing and this is my first tank with a sump, it was all pre-plumbed, drilled etc. im just trying to make it less noisy.

http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/i...9/stockman.jpg

anyone used the stockman style before?

stockman
 

i switched from a durso to a stockman and i'm very happy with it-takes up way less room and is matinence free

A stockman works fine but it's a little harder to make. If you can fit a 2" coupling in your overflow then use 1.25" pipe and a 1.25"x2" bushing. You'll have to drill or grind off the bushing stop so the bushing can slide onto 1.25" pipe far enough so the pipe protrudes far enough through the bushing to allow a 1.25" cap to fit. Just as with the stockman you'll need a 1/8" hole in the top of the cap to prevent siphon. You'll also want a 1.5x1.25" bushing for the top of the bulkhead for the standpipe and you'll still want to reduce the drain pipe size to 1" for best results.

A good tip when building a standpipe is to make it taller than you need and then trim the base of the pipe to fit after it's built.

generally people use bulkheads that look like this:
http://www.radio-media.com/fish/Bulkhead.jpg

What you can do is use this male adapter:
http://ukirrigation.weirdpepper.com/...988552_247.jpg

and make a nut for it by cutting a female adapter off at the threads:
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...rlil2mDwsNCu9T

You will need a seal still, so using the seal from a bulkhead, or finding one in a hardware store works fine.


The only reason to do this is to get a little bit extra flow through a smaller hole. With a bulkhead you are inserting a bulkhead into the hole, then a pipe into the bulkhead, this reduces the hole size that water actually flows through.