Herbie drain is a pain

[Potatohead]

Originally Posted by albert_dao

Are you able to raise the water so that you get a tiny trickle into the emergency drain? Cut it down a bit if need be.

This is an option I'm trying to avoid, but in the end I may not have another choice. The emergency drain is actually drilled into the side of the tank higher up than the drain hole (for space reasons) and I can't really lower it. If I run it with a trickle in the emergency, it will work but it raises the level in the DT higher than I want it to be. I set it all up so that it would just start draining before the tank overflowed, but all in all we're only talking about 1.5" difference in height.

Originally Posted by mihaivapler

If you have a DC pump then that's the problem.Some of them don't keep a constant voltage which result's in more or less flow(happens to me with jebao12000)What i did is i tuned the gate valve that is just flowing a tiny bit in the emergency drain and when start to push more water it goes down on the emergency,usually doesn't last for long and go back in level.

It's an AC pump (Tunze 1073.02) so I don't know if the flow would really vary or not, I know turning them down with a restriction will reduce their power consumption but I don't know if more power means more flow. We're talking about not much water over a long period of time though, my whole system is only like 38 gallons so it only takes about 1/2 gallon to really make a big difference. 1/2 gallon over 3 - 4 days isn't much change in flow. Maybe the issue is lack of water volume and I just have to live with it, but I hope not.