Update – System layout
System Overview Diagram by
choerenz, on Flickr
Ok – sorry if the image isn’t the easiest to understand but I wanted to show how the system will be set up and break down my maintenance plans and why I am setting things up this way. A few posts back I talked about the very difficult (and nerve wracking) decision to drill a hole through my hard wood floor. So let me start there.
The layout of my house is actually very much set up to support a fully separate equipment room right below where the display tank will be located. This is no accident. I purchased the house in Westchester NY back in 1996. The house was built in 1908 and needed a ton of work. My wife and I had the opportunity to renovate and add a few things that were very specific to our needs. At the time, I had just moved a really “happy” and thriving 30 gallon reef tank from my NY city apartment, into a 75 gallon holding tank in my basement.
I had every intention on setting up a 180-200 gallon tank in my office. I asked the contractors to add extra support in the floor of this room (which I’m not sure they did) and located a utility room right beneath in the garage area. The room was plumbed with a slop sink, and was ready to go. Then I found out that heating system in the house would need to be replaced and this opened the door up for duct work and central AC. The bad news is the heating unit had to go into my utility room. The room is still big enough to house a sump but it’s a bit tighter and so I’ll get into my decision to house the sump in the main display room rather than locating it in the room below.
One side bar, as things will happen, during the renovation, my holding tank was covered with a tarp during the construction in the basement. Well unfortunately the cover fell off, and the tank was exposed to massive amounts of dust from the sheetrock and demo work. Needless-to-say nothing survived and I was devastated. I never ended up setting up the 180 and got out of the hobby until 2014 when I bought the AIO 40 gallon. So that is the back story.
Sump Location
I really did not want to drill multiple holes in the floors. I’m running a bean animal and I would have needed an opening large enough to feed 4 pipes. I also wasn’t psyched about getting a bigger pump, head pressure etc. In thinking things through, I opted for a different plan. I would go for a minimally invasive opening (in floor or wall) and set up an automatic water change system using small John Guest pipes, from a station below to a small sump hidden in a cabinet by the main display tank. I have studied a few of these setups and once these systems are in place, maintenance is pretty easy. In my case, I’ll pretty much be cleaning my skimmer and harvesting Chaeto.
In reviewing the diagram above, let me first describe the setup so that the image makes a bit more sense.
In the main DT room, we have the three structures. The electrical cabinet to the left of the tank, the main display stand which is exposed steel pipes and walnut, and a cabinet to the right that hides a 24 gallon cube sump.
Then in the room directly below, we have the following items from right to left:
RODI water container: Because I will be feeding the system above using the Tunze Osmolator, I started thinking about whether I could locate this high enough in the room to feed the tank in the room above via the 7’ of so max head height of the stock pump. It sits roughly 5-6 feet below the sump give or take. I will test this soon and if the pump cannot handle the distance and height, I will resort to adding a stronger pump to my refill system. Once I settled on this location for the RODI tank, I began considering the benefits of the setup:
• I can leverage the RODI pressure to fill the tank that sits on a high shelf, and then leverage gravity to feed the salt mixing station
• I can also use gravity to refill the frag tank (if necessary) that sits directly below the 35 RODI tank.
To find a tank, I went to a local tractor supply store and found this:
https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/pr...l?cm_vc=-10005
The way I will run this setup, this tank should never be empty as it is continuously fed from the RODI unit which is shut off with a float valve in the RODI storage tank. Daily, for about 30 minutes, a solenoid will open and refill as necessary.
RODI container shelf: I built the stand for the container using the same design as the sump cabinet (rocketengineer design).
finished container stand by
choerenz, on Flickr
RODI tank and stand by
choerenz, on Flickr
As I was putting the stand together I was struck by an interesting idea that began to form. I had another small storage room that currently houses a fish QT tank, and what I was planning as setting up as a frag QT tank. But then I began to think, as I am pulling water out of my main display tank via the automatic water change pump, why drain it straight to the sink? So an idea was born….