newbie piping questions - what size return - what size overflow?

[Skimmerking]

IME
The days of having huge water volumes through a sump are pretty much over. Lots of people are converting over to having less flow in the sump for 3 important reasons.
1 to clean from the skimmer
2 to heat from the heaters
3 less chance of having micro bubbles
lots of people are going with the bigger water movers in the main display IE
Tunze's
Vortech's
closed loop
but for a rule of thumb the measurements are like this as the following
3/4"- 750 gph
1"-1000 gph
1.5"- 1500 gph
2"- 2000 gph
that is a approx measurement. But personally I would stay in the 1.5"-2" for the drainage just so that if anything goes down you don't get a clog from it.

[Milad]

i really liked bean's design and i like the idea of going with water movers in the tank
The tank already has two holes drilled so can i use those two holes to push water into the tank? and drill three more holes up higher to implment bean's design? all with smaller piping?

here is a drawing of what i mean:
The green pipes are the return and the red are the drain

[Milad]

btw which pump would you guys suggest?

[golf nut]

You might want to reconfigure the returns to the the tank, they are somewhat low, if the power fails you will have a flood on your hands, ideally they should return to the opposite end where they would move the surface water to the overflow box but that would alter the aesthetics of the tank. You could reduce the width of the overflow box and bring the returns up higher on the end sides to reduce the flooding issue.

[Milad]

can I not use some sort of check vavle?
http://www.plastomatic.com/ckm.html

those holes are already drilled so thats why i figured ill use them.

Originally Posted by Mr OM

You might want to reconfigure the returns to the the tank, they are somewhat low, if the power fails you will have a flood on your hands, ideally they should return to the opposite end where they would move the surface water to the overflow box but that would alter the aesthetics of the tank. You could reduce the width of the overflow box and bring the returns up higher on the end sides to reduce the flooding issue.

[golf nut]

I removed the word check valve from my dictionary, Murphy advised it.

Do you have pictures of exactly what holes you have and where?

[Milad]

MR OM i hear what you mean, one more thing that could go wrong
The current holes are about 8 inches from top and about 4 inches from the side
The second rendering has the green pipes going through the current holes

Bloodasp, wouldnt that just make it drain the same water that was returned back up?

[Bloodasp]

You could put a 90 degree elbow on your return going up. not sure what it will do to the look of your tank but worth trying in your rendering. The check valve could work too and just do regular maintenance to make sure it is not failing.

[kien]

oh hey this is where you guys all went!

All you need are two drains to run a herbie as already mentioned. One for the main and one for the emergency. It looks like you have a third in your overflow box? I'd either cap that off and don't use it, or 'T' two of them together as your main and use the third as an emergency. Another option is to use the third as a second emergency which I think you were planning but that is a little overkill. Nothing wrong with that though I guess. If your drains are 1.5" it will be very hard to overflow a wide open 1.5" drain unless your return pump is rated for something insane like 3000gph (don't forget about the loss of flow due to elbow, head and such), which it probably won't because then you're pushing way too much water through your sump in my opinion

Another thing, those holes that you are planning to use as returns, I personally would not use them. They are a bit low and will probably cause overflow in your sump (unless your sump is massive, like 200g and only run at half level) if the power goes out. You can throw a check valve on those but you will need to remove those check valves and clean them frequently otherwise they will gum up with junk and eventually fail. Or worse, what happens if a snail gets in there? If it can happen imagine that it will :-) It may not happen today or tomorrow or next month, but that's the problem with Murphy right? You just don't know when.. Instead, I would run your return up and over the edge of the tank and while you're at it I would run the return pipe to the other end of the tank (opposite from the return overflow).

There's really no right on wrong answer really, whatever you end up doing, if you get water into the sump and out of the sump then it is working. It all boils down to how efficient you want to make it, how much maintenance you want down the road, how much of a failure alleviation factor you want to put in, etc.. Based on my experience with peninsulas that's what I would do :-) There are a crap load of them on canreef, just do a search and you'll find them :-)

[MikeInToronto]

Originally Posted by kien

All you need are two drains to run a herbie as already mentioned. One for the main and one for the emergency. It looks like you have a third in your overflow box? I'd either cap that off and don't use it, or 'T' two of them together as your main and use the third as an emergency. Another option is to use the third as a second emergency which I think you were planning but that is a little overkill. Nothing wrong with that though I guess. If your drains are 1.5" it will be very hard to overflow a wide open 1.5" drain unless your return pump is rated for something insane like 3000gph (don't forget about the loss of flow due to elbow, head and such), which it probably won't because then you're pushing way too much water through your sump in my opinion

He has 3 because he's planning a Beananimal, and he has more than enough room to do it. I wouldn't sacrifice the extra security if I didn't have to, even if I thought it was redundant.