Centralised Sump System on 1460L System

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Vicki.ann

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Mar 10, 2010
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London
We have a setup consisting of 9 tanks, 3 @ 88.5L, 3 @ 133L and 3 @ 265.5L, and would like to filter them all on a centralised sump system.

They are arranged on 3 tier stands, so 3 of the tanks are situated a few inches above the floor, 3 are about 30 inches from the floor and the other 3 are about 60 inches from the floor.

----- I have gleaned that a sump should be at worst 1/3 of the overall system capacity, so am I right in thinking a 490L sump would be adequate?

I was thinking for drainage, to drill an overflow into each tank about 4" from the top (would this work out?) and then drain all 3 of the tanks at each height through 1" pipes into a 3" pipe going into the sump (so there would be three 3" pipes going into the sump).

Then I was thinking of a homemade wet/dry trickle tower (made from a plastic chest of drawers with holes drilled in the bottom of each drawer) in one end of the sump, then the sump would have dimensions something like 36" x 24" x 30". The tower would have a prefilter and the rest biomedia and would feed into the end compartment of the sump, then I would have two dividers to divide the remaining space into 3. One would be for mechanical filter media, another for the option of water wisteria etc to stabilise the system, and the final one for the equipment.

----- Am I right in thinking to feed back to these tanks which are on such different levels I will need to have 3 return pumps, and the returns are in the same formation as the drains (ie one return pump for each 'level')?

I have never used or made a sump before, and we have been running these tanks on separate filtration but I think the whole lot would be a lot more stable if it were centralised. These fish are only ever going to be our permanent fish, we have spare tanks for QT with separate filtration, so the risk of disease is minimal.

----- Finally, what pumps do people recommend for this?

Any help greatly appreciated, we'd like to get this on the road as quickly as possible :D
 
It seems like your off to a good start. The only thing I would question is one return pump for 3 tanks? You need to ask yourself if, especially at the higher level tanks, would it be adequate for all three? Would all three have the same filtration rate? It can be tricky using one pump to return to three tanks.

The overflows will be your best bet so that way it won't drain too much is return flow decreases and it shouldn't have a problem draining water. I like the trickle tower idea. It has been done before with great success.

An old LFS by me that shut down used a very similar system. He had a 300 gallon rubbermaid tank in the back that he used as the sump.

I am no expert so definitely wait for someone who has the experience with these kinda of setups to give you advice, but other then my questions about return pumps it sounds good.
 
Thanks for your reply - I'm glad it's not a dreadful start at least!

We discussed the fact that the filtration rates on the 3 tanks wouldn't be the same - but we would make sure that the pump was rated high enough so that worse case scenario the biggest tank being fed by one pump was being turned over just about 3 x an hour and the smaller tanks would be more, up to about 9 x an hour.
We would go for a turnover of about 3,000lph for the top level and either the same or less for the lower levels.

Or would it make more sense to use one pump for each stand of tanks, so all of the 88.5L tanks would be fed by the same pump, all of the 133L tanks fed by the same pump etc - or would there be problems because they are all at different heights?
Would we need to run the return pipe up to the very top of each stand first and then split it to run down to feed each tank on the stand?
But then, I guess all of the tanks at every level would 'suffer' for the fact that the top tanks are so high!
 
I definitely would not do one pump to tanks at different heights. They made me do that at school once and it took hours and hours to get it all set up and even then it could never keep the tanks level for long. If you must go with one pump for more then one tank I would definitely keep a pumps returns all at the same level with ball valves at the end to adjust flow.
 
Okay, slight re-think. We are now looking at having one pump per tank BUT still having the combined overflow drains into the sump.
So, this would mean we need an end compartment big enough to take 9 pumps.

We are planning on a minimum 3x turnover for every tank, so we're planning to use 3 x Rio 1700, 2 x Rio 800HP, 2 x Rio 1100, 1 x Rio 400 and 1 x Rio 90.

I calculated that these should be sufficient based on a pump head loss calculator and a manufacturer's table of performance based upon head loss.

Would this work? Having so many pumps in one sump?

It would certainly be more reliable from POV of getting a constant and predictable filtration rate on each individual tank ...
 
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