Today was productive -- I got my sump moved, got holes drilled, and got the pump plumbed up and running. Big thanks to Aquatic Art for having a 2" bulkhead in stock and selling it to me (along with some other miscellaneous parts) Saturday evening.
My basement equipment room is under the stairs -- taking any more space in the finished basement was met with quite a lot of resistance from my wife. So while I have more room available than what is under the stand of my 150, I don't have a ton more room. When I built this system, I knew I'd upgrade it eventually and add in a refugium which has been purchased but not installed. For some odd reason buying salt water today was difficult.
This morning I got up with full intentions of plumbing in the BLDC-15 and moving my sump. My 19 month-old son helped.
First things first -- the BLDC-15 next to the PX-200 originally intended for this purpose
new for sale)
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I shut down the existing 100PX and disconnected and cleaned my sump (Trigger Systems Ruby-36S). Then it was 3" hole drilling time.
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Fast-forward, the 2" bulkhead is installed, plumbed up to a single-union valve. (I'd rather have had a true-union valve but Lowe's didn't have one in 2".) The outlet of the pump is plumbed 1.5" to a 1.5" tee which is bushing-ed down to 1" on two outlets. The top outlet goes to the return and the side goes to a 3-valve 1" manifold. I built a small pump stand out of some scrap since my 60" sump stand isn't long enough for all the plumbing AND the sump. The pump looks pretty small with all that 2" and 1.5" pipe attached.
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3-valve angle-mounted PVC manifold feeding the BRS reactor and soon a refugium
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Handy-dandy BRS reactor running GFO and GAC:
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Shot of the sump on the bottom level of the DIY stand.
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I feel I must apologize for the quality of the lighting, my plumbing, (I'm a computer scientist by education and a salesman by profession) and my crap iPhone shots.
Anyway, first impressions: I run about 18' of head pressure (including elbows, height, and constrictions) which the BLDC chart says should push roughly 800 GPH which is more than I'm getting. Roughly I'm pushing 500GPH. Now, my plumbing goes down to 1" up to the main level of my house and I have some 3/4" tubing up there which I was going to replace today but ran out of spaflex. The pump itself is amazingly quiet and is easily drowned out by the sound of the eheim running my skimmer and the sound of the water falling back into the sump. At this point I am quite happy with it. Now to make the rest of the return plumbing more efficient. Interesting enough: when I opened the valves for the reactors, the return flow upstairs did not decrease.
I'll update this thread when that's done! Anyone got about 10' of 1" spaflex to sell?
Thanks!
Adam
