Possible 5.5g Refugium

[Jennie]

Here is a picture of the setup. Still have to camo the hose and such. Everthing is still scattered about, but the flow is balancing. But I beg of you all, please help with the noise issue. If I can't find a quick solution tonight, Im disconnecting until I do, I just can't live with that. :evil:

 

[incysor]

First I'd just like to say that it looks great. I'd have centered the tank and just drilled a hole to run it through to the main tank, but then I'm not particularly attached to nearly any of my furniture. :smile:



It's hard to tell from your pic, but if your overflow box has a standard bulkhead you can screw a small bit of pvc pipe into it so it sticks up and lets the overflow box fill a bit more. That may help it, you can also put a 90 degree elbow at the top of this small piece of pipe and that will usually help. Here's a link to a thread that has a picture that show's sort of what I'm talking about. Again it's hard to tell from the pic because of the angle, but it looks like there's quite a bit of excess tubing and it kind of has to come back up through the hole in the side of the cabinet. Or that could be the return line, I just can't tell from the pic. If it is the overflow line you might try cut the tubing shorter so it's more of a straight shot back to the tank. It might cut down on some of the gurgle. My overflow tube was too long and nothing I did would quiet the thing down, once I got a shorter tube so it was more of a straight shot to the sump it got a bit better.

My overflow box just has a sponge pre-filter on it, and that quiets it down, but if you're wanting some of the critters from the nano to make it down into your main system then that won't really work for you. If you're not interested the second pic is what I'm talking about. Although my pre-filter sponge is much longer than the one in the pic.

Good luck. When my wife and I set up the tanks the first time they were in our bedroom, and for the first few nights I thought the overflow noise was going to drive me crazy. I managed to get the tank with the overflow box quieted down with the pre-filter sponge easily enough but the 55 with the internal overflow was always sort of noisy.

B

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showt ... ost2807782

http://marinedepot.com/md_viewItem.asp?idproduct=CR1511

 

[Jennie]

Thanks for the compliments! As for the tank being centered, it just didn't work out that way due to the way my husband made the overflow box. If I had left it centered the return would have been kinked.

There's a pump in the back left corner of the main tank pumping water up to the left side of the fuge, with the return being on the right. Due to the 'bubbles' I placed the return line in the back of the HOB filter. This seemed to give a nice undisturbed flow through the tank. Will have to shorten the hoses I know, but until I figure out the best way (without drilling the cabinet) I wanted to leave plenty of length.

As for quieting the 'flushing toilet', we placed a length of airline tubing down the return line and it restricted the flow just enough to have the water level in the outer box of overflow raise enough to prevent it from catching air! Ghetto I know, but we slept last night!

 

[incysor]

Thanks for the compliments! As for the tank being centered, it just didn't work out that way due to the way my husband made the overflow box. If I had left it centered the return would have been kinked.

There's a pump in the back left corner of the main tank pumping water up to the left side of the fuge, with the return being on the right. Due to the 'bubbles' I placed the return line in the back of the HOB filter. This seemed to give a nice undisturbed flow through the tank. Will have to shorten the hoses I know, but until I figure out the best way (without drilling the cabinet) I wanted to leave plenty of length.

As for quieting the 'flushing toilet', we placed a length of airline tubing down the return line and it restricted the flow just enough to have the water level in the outer box of overflow raise enough to prevent it from catching air! Ghetto I know, but we slept last night!

I have a friend that used the same method to quiet his 180. I tried it on my 55 and it never worked for me, which is probably why I forgot to mention it.

:smile:

B