Re: [Killietalk] Pump for recirculation system

[Ken Simolo <Simolo at chem_chem.rochester.edu>]

Your water does not seem hard to me (softer than mine).

Early on, I did not listen to my mentor's advice and played around a 
lot with my water.  In my fish room, I had two different drip 
systems.  One was fed directly with hard water from my well.  The 
other was fed by a submersible pump in a 55 gallon Rubbermaid plastic 
trash can and had a heater setup just off the floor of the can and 
added a large air stone.  This 55 gallon can was supplied from the 
system described below via a stock feed tank float valve (large valve 
so very little resistance to the gravity feed flow from the system 
below).  All of my tanks could be run off of either the hard water 
system or the soft water system just by changing which manifolded 
drip emitter the tank was connected to.

To feed the 55 gallon reservoir, I added bulkhead drains to the lower 
side of (3) 35 gallon Rubbermaid trash cans and plumbed them together 
with isolation valves.   These 3 cans were on a table on the other 
side of my fish room wall since that was where I had the room and I 
wanted the height so I could have a simple gravity drain to the 55 
gallon can on the floor in the fish room).  On each 35  gallon trash 
can, I installed two of SpectraPure's cheap float valves into the 
side of the trash can.  One was about one third of the way up the 
trash can and was hooked up to my well water.  The second was at the 
top and hooked up to my RO system.  Each of the cans had an air 
bubbler in it.  Normally, I would have two of the isolation valves 
open and these two would feed the 55 gallon reservoir.  That gave me 
a 125 gallon capacity.  When I fed my fish, I would first check the 
level of the two 35 gallon containers.  If they were almost empty, I 
would close their drain valves, open up the valves on their lower 
hard water float valve, open up the drain valve on the 3rd can, and 
go feed my fish.  When done feeding my fish, the float valves on the 
hard water would have shut off and i would close their supply valves. 
Then I would open up the RO float valve supply valves.  All of these 
supply valves were SpectraPure's 1/4 plastic valves.  If I wanted to 
add salt or anything else, I would just add the appropriate amount to 
the two cans at that time.  Then, I would just leave and let the RO 
float valves shut off when they were full.  The next day, I would 
shut off the RO supply valves and open up one of the drain isolation 
valves so I one again had 2 cans hooked up to the system.  Obviously, 
one can very the number of cans to meet one's needs.  If one added an 
electronic shutoff float valve to the pump in the  55 gallon drum, 
one could use just the 55 gallon drum (or other size) with the 
SpectraPure float valves installed on it for a smaller system.  I did 
use an electronic shutoff float valve to protect my submersible pump 
in case I forgot to check the system.

It was easier to design the system than type all of this!

After doing all of this for a while, I found that most fish do fine 
in my hard water and that the improvements I saw from the drip system 
were mainly from the high quality of the tank water from the 
automatic water changes (just put the pump on the appropriate type of 
timer) and from the good food fed to the fish.  For most species, it 
did not matter whether or not they were on the hard or soft water 
system (I should have listened to my mentor and saved a lot of time 
by not putting in a duplicate more complicated system).  For the few 
that mattered, I just isolated them when I wanted to breed them and 
added RO water to their tank to make the water softer.  I may however 
turn this system back on if i want to again have some tanks 
significantly different than others (especially if I want to have a 
bunch of natural set ups with softer water where I am never pulling 
the parents out to breed them).

Sorry this is so long!

Ken
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