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Re: Wet/dry help
On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, Steve Bansee wrote:
> For the overflow I was thinking about getting the back glass of the 50 gal.
> drilled, add a strainer and two elbows. This is kind of hard for me to
> explain, so I drew it, www.icenter.net/~tvg/misc/outflow.gif . I have seen
> this at one LFS here in town. Do you all see any problems doing this?
This approach is generally a lot more reliable than an overflow box,
because there's no siphon to break. The only downsides are that you don't
get any mechanical prefiltering (I have a big sponge in my prefilter that
turns a gallon of water opaque when I rinse it out), and you are going to
have a concentrated amount of flow on the intake unless you can find some
way to spread out the surface area on the strainer (consider that an
overflow box has maybe 6-10 linear inches where the water flows in, but a
3/4" pvc EL has maybe 2-3 inches.
One way around both of these might be to build a 4-sided skimmer box out
of acrylic or glass (though it'd be hard to do those little notched
"teeth" with a glass piece!), and actually silicone it right to the back
where you put your PVC intake. Put a prefilter sponge inside the "box",
over the PVC pipe. Then the inside el is not used, but everything else
stays the same as your original design.
> Also need some help trying to figure out what pump to get (I'm thinking
> something that will do about 200 gph), the bottom of the sump is going to be
> about 4ft from the top of the tank. What would you all recommend
> (inexpensive now, remember :-)....
Definitely get something that will do more than 200 gph and regulate it
with ball valves on the return. My first tank used an aquaclear 802
powerhead, and I had nothing but trouble. I use a Quiet One by Rainbow
(based on George Booth's recommendation), which has run flawlessly for 4
years now.
- Erik
--
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com