kien's 150g Room Divider Mixed Reef & Stuff

[xtreme]

Rona has a better selection of PVC than HD. You should be able to find most of what you need there. The only thing they won't have are gate valves if you are planning a herbie.

[kien]

I picked up some gate valves and some misc attachments from Red Coral last weekend. I picked up a nice green ball valve from Rona on the weekend as well (I have this thing for green stuff). Colby is providing me with the bulkheads for all my holes. He also suggested that I check out Western Pump. They are literally 5 minutes from my house (on 114st near Barlow Trail SE), so I'm going to stop in on my way home from work one of these evenings and check them out. Although, as xtreme said, Rona has the largest selection I have seen so far, minus the gate valves and bulkheads.

[kien]

Okay, so after 4 trips to Rona, a failed trip to Home Depot (how can a hardware store not have 1" PVC pipe ??? ) and 3 trips to Western Pump, I finally collected all the parts I needed. The plumbing wasn't difficult, but there were many challenges that needed to be thought out, drawn out, solved and executed.

Here's my loot! Gate valve from Red Coral, bulkheads from Elite Aquatics. I like to spread the wealth :-)



So first up are the stand pipes for the 4 drains (two primaries, 1 to fuge and 1 emergency). Simple enough.



Next I tackle the main drain. I have two 1" drains that I wanted to merge into one 2" pipe so that I can use one gate valve on it. I believe a 1 1/2" pipe will flow more than two 1" pipes. Here's what I came up with.



North and South views
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I was happy with it so I attached the gate valve and the elbow into the sump.

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[kien]

The other two drains went pretty much the same way, minus the gate valve and the merging. Here you can see the trio of drains. That forth pipe in the back there is the return, more on that later! One thing I just noticed is that I should put a gate valve on the line to the fuge. I'm not convinced that this is 100% necessary but I'll probably attach one in the end.



One tricky thing I had to tackle was how to run the fuge line while still giving myself enough clearance for the skimmer cup. The sump is only 12" wide and that skimmer is huge! In the end I just slanted the sump so that the fuge line was running at an angle towards the fuge.

[kien]

Lastly I worked on the return line. At first I was going to run it with a bunch of 90 degree elbows, but after playing around with the wider elbows with the return lines I decide to make a 90 degree turn with two wide elbows to give it more of a gentle turn.

Here's the return line running up the back side and top. In the end I'm not sure if it'll make a huge difference in flow but I figured every little bit helps!

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One thing you may have noticed is that there is no check valve on the return! Honestly, I am not a fan of check valves. I've used them before and after time they just get gunky and don't close properly. Instead, I will be drilling holes into the back of my two return nozzles so that it breaks the siphon in the event of a power loss. I'm currently using this method on my 90 gallon tank and it works quite well. Yes, the nozzles can get plugged with gunk too but it is much easier to clean the nozzles than it is to clean the check valve.

Here it is snaking around the front end and dropping into the tank.





Something else you might notice is that I am not using bulkheads for the two return nozzles. I have the bulkheads for them but when I started working on it I quickly realized that the entire return line on top of the tank would have to be raised a few inches off the glass if I used the bulkheads. I didn't like this because then I would have to support the return line with something. Also, it would be a pain to reach into the tank on that side if the return line was higher. In the end I opted not to use those two bulkheads and just shoved the return nozzles right into the holes in the eurobrace.



So that's the plumbing in a nutshell. It wasn't rocket science but you do need to plan it out and remember to measure twice and cut once! Or, if you're like me, just run out and buy more PVC (but not from Home Depot because for some reason they don't believe in PVC).

Here are a couple of full tank shots to wrap up this stage.

[Navarchus]

Looks very tidt and neat!!!
Just make sure that you connect the return pump to the return pipe via flexible tube.
It will help to prevent pump vibration going to the pipe and making irritating noise.

[kien]

Yup! That's why that bit is empty right now. I have all the barbed fittings to hook up a flexible tube but need the flexible tube :-) It also makes it easier to maintain the return pump in case I need to service.