Sploosh!!!

[Delphinus]

Hi Brad, I went with the toilet-flapper aka Borneman-style over the Carlson-style because it is said to be less noisy. It's definitely not bad, I hardly notice the noise at all.

The basic setup is this. My surge tank is in a room in behind the tank, with the plumbing coming through the wall. That said, there is a doorway right next to the tank and surge bucket and sump right next to the door which I must keep open (otherwise I'd have to have a different room for the cats to do their business in).

There is a slight "ker-sploosh" in the tank at the onset of the surge, and a slightly discernable "thunk!" of the flapper valve slapping shut at the end of the surge. The slurping sound in between is easily filtered out by other ambient noises. The one noise that I do notice is there is a slight increase in the tank overflow's gurgling as it has to deal with the increased water flow for about 15 seconds or so.

There is a fair amount of bubbles introduced by the surge, but they clear themselves within 15 seconds or so. I actually don't find the bubbles very offensive at all (which is unusual, given my earlier loathing of microbubbles from the sump return, which took me months of replumbing and replumbing to finally solve). I had to create a vent at the end of the discharge tube, otherwise all the air in the discharge tube come out the outputs in this tremendously big "burp" at the beginning of the surge which was completely unacceptable (for one it was splashing over the tank's edge, plus getting my halides wet. Whooops!) But I drilled a small U-tube at the top of the discharge tube and this burp went away. The air exits the top of the discharge tube via this smaller U-tube, and then water spills out towards the end, but since it's a U-tube the water just exits into the tank.

The only way, I think, to completely eliminate any air bubbles would be to figure out a way to keep the discharge tube completely flooded in between surges. I beleive this could be done by having the lower edge of the surge bucket just below the top of the tank's water level. It might be tricky finding just the right height though, because I found that if the water level in the bucket doesn't go down right to the bottom, you can have problems with the flapper valve not closing (if the water level stays too high in the bucket at all times then it just remains floating). Might need to play around with this a bit before putting it "into production" on a reef tank. But it's an idea I want to toy around with for sure.

The other thing I want to eventually also play aorund with is an actual dump-bucket, to try to create an even more impressive "wave" of water. I haven't found too many useful DIY plans for somethin like that though ... and certainly a more risky project because it involves more moving parts ... at least with the toilet flapper, it comes with a built-in overflow so if the flapper fails for some reason, at least the water drains back into your tank and not the floor. :D

[ 09 September 2002, 09:41: Message edited by: delphinus ]