Drip system a floor above?
- Thread starter DaveB
- Start date
dmopar74;4230585; said:
Dave keeps SA cihlids (eartheaters) same as I that do not do well in hard water at all. The only water harder than my tap is ice...
JK47;4230556; said:Thank you Dave that was kind!Well I really liked Jose's design with the splitter off of the laundry room outlet so that is what I am going with only with a twist like yours of doing two seperate incoming lines. It is convenient that it's about 8 feet from my tank so preasure is no issue. I bought two splitters so that I could have three outlets (one splitter onto another) to hook on to.
first = washing machine, second = RO unit, third = chlorine/chloramine filter. I will be doing a 75% RO, 25% tap roughly. I have everything so far but the chlorine/chloramine filter. I will order that when I am done with my sump and send you pics so you can see what I mean. Subscribed on this thread. Lets get it sorted out for you.
Where I get confused is by the goal of doing this to two different tanks. Now that I've shifted the downstairs one off the shared wall, it's a bit more than 8 feet and I'll probably have to go up and through the ceiling to get over to it. So to make the pressure work I'll want to split it in the utilty room but not put the drip regulator stuff on until the very end at the tank side, right? Otherwise the drip wouldn't be able to climb the walls at all.
But the RO can only do 50gpd too... so how do I deal with that? If I put that in the utility room, how does the water that gets past that get the push it needs to get upstairs?
The other part where I differ from Jose is that he had a nice easy place to drain to, whereas I can't just dump it into the floor. I can tap the upstairs tank into just about anything, I guess, but the downstairs one is below grade. I'm not sure how to get rid of the extra water there.
I am definitely smart enough to understand plumbing, but I have literally NO experience with it, so I feel completely useless here.
The current thinking is that I'd actually run the RO unit upstairs in the stand for the show tank, then have its outlet and drain head downstairs, powered by gravity.
The issue then becomes how to drain the downstairs tank, as it currently does not share a wall with the utility room and is below grade. Gravity works against me in that case.
If I stick with just a 125 down there (undesirable) I can probably get away with putting it against the front wall, which allows me a way to run a tube over to the utility room. Maybe then I can set up some kind of sump system in the other room that stays quiet in the theater and feeds fresh drip-supplemented water back. Who knows. But if I go with the larger tank I intend to, it'll need to be on that back wall. And so maybe it'll just need to get RO from a bucket or something.
I'm also trying to figure out a way that I can get more tanks in the utility room. These aren't the best pictures, but basically the PVC for the building waste stuff clogs up the entire back corner (we just put the cat litter there) and the rest of stuff is spaced out just enough to prevent a stack of good sized tanks. Right now I have a 10g on the counter next to the sink and a rickety shelf set up in very close quarters behind the door, wedged right in front of the furnace, with a 20l. (It's rickety because I tore the backing off it to allow for air and access to get back there.) The blue one that is visible is the short unit for the heated floors downstairs, then next to it is the bigger furnace and then the AC. The door swings in and to the right, so it'd hit those units if not for the shelf being there.
Oh, so anyway, just out of frame in the 2nd photo, there's both that grey round manhole-esque cover that I believe is where "grey" water goes, and next to it is a black one that is bolted down that is for waste. There are two pipes going into that. In an ideal world I could figure out a way to splice right into the very bottom of the grey inlet pipe and that'd be an easy gravity-fed drain, even for a downstairs tank. But that's one of those things I'm sure would not be allowed.
So I'm wondering if my best approach is to find a place to collect about 50 gallons of clean RO and just have a nice powerful pump that I can use to refill the downstairs tank from it. That pump could also be used to drain a fry/hospital tank down at floor level on the shelf too, meaning I could cram at least another 20l or 29 in there in the same space. That'd kill two birds with one stone. I kind of wish I hadn't sold my Mag 12 now.
By the way, this is totally unrelated but does anyone know what that black motor is on top of the water heater? I did not have one of those in the last house. Is it a pump for upstairs? It makes too much noise. As does the AC unit, which is probably 3x as loud as the last place.
The issue then becomes how to drain the downstairs tank, as it currently does not share a wall with the utility room and is below grade. Gravity works against me in that case.
If I stick with just a 125 down there (undesirable) I can probably get away with putting it against the front wall, which allows me a way to run a tube over to the utility room. Maybe then I can set up some kind of sump system in the other room that stays quiet in the theater and feeds fresh drip-supplemented water back. Who knows. But if I go with the larger tank I intend to, it'll need to be on that back wall. And so maybe it'll just need to get RO from a bucket or something.
I'm also trying to figure out a way that I can get more tanks in the utility room. These aren't the best pictures, but basically the PVC for the building waste stuff clogs up the entire back corner (we just put the cat litter there) and the rest of stuff is spaced out just enough to prevent a stack of good sized tanks. Right now I have a 10g on the counter next to the sink and a rickety shelf set up in very close quarters behind the door, wedged right in front of the furnace, with a 20l. (It's rickety because I tore the backing off it to allow for air and access to get back there.) The blue one that is visible is the short unit for the heated floors downstairs, then next to it is the bigger furnace and then the AC. The door swings in and to the right, so it'd hit those units if not for the shelf being there.
Oh, so anyway, just out of frame in the 2nd photo, there's both that grey round manhole-esque cover that I believe is where "grey" water goes, and next to it is a black one that is bolted down that is for waste. There are two pipes going into that. In an ideal world I could figure out a way to splice right into the very bottom of the grey inlet pipe and that'd be an easy gravity-fed drain, even for a downstairs tank. But that's one of those things I'm sure would not be allowed.
So I'm wondering if my best approach is to find a place to collect about 50 gallons of clean RO and just have a nice powerful pump that I can use to refill the downstairs tank from it. That pump could also be used to drain a fry/hospital tank down at floor level on the shelf too, meaning I could cram at least another 20l or 29 in there in the same space. That'd kill two birds with one stone. I kind of wish I hadn't sold my Mag 12 now.
By the way, this is totally unrelated but does anyone know what that black motor is on top of the water heater? I did not have one of those in the last house. Is it a pump for upstairs? It makes too much noise. As does the AC unit, which is probably 3x as loud as the last place.
