I see you've got a motorized ball-valve inline with the Grundfos. Doesn't that stop the hot water from circulating to the heat exchanger when the tank is up to temp? I would think your heat exchanger wouldn't be constantly robbing the house of hot water if your tank is already at the correct temperature.
My 405
- Thread starter Black_Diamond
- Start date
I see you've got a motorized ball-valve inline with the Grundfos. Doesn't that stop the hot water from circulating to the heat exchanger when the tank is up to temp? I would think your heat exchanger wouldn't be constantly robbing the house of hot water if your tank is already at the correct temperature.
So both the Grundfos and the motorized ball valve are plugged in through an Inkbird Wifi thermostat that cuts the power to them when the tank reaches temp. The motorized ball valve is purely as a backup for just in case (or more like when) the Grundfos fails, the motorized ball valve will close the loop and prevent it from continuing to heat the tank.
This being said it is probably completely unnecessary due to the fact that should the Grundfos motor fail it would more than likely just not pull water to the tank and be stagnant. However I put the ball valve on there as well just because I didn't trust what the system would do at first and wanted another temp controller to be able to shut off the system if it got too hot, essentially just so it didn't cook my rays haha.
Now for your next question to which I am still a little stumped. I cannot understand for the life of me why it makes the rest of the house not have hot water. When the system was first set up I had the valves in the completely open position and so it was starving the house of hot water. Over the past week I have been closing the shutoff valve in increments to not allow so much water into the heat exchange loop and allow more water to T off to the rest of the house which has worked slowly but surely. BUT get this?! For some odd reason I can maintain hot water all throughout the day but during the night it does whatever it does I'm not sure if that's running more because of the colder temp of the house or what but it never fails that I get woken up when my GF wants to take a shower and for whatever reason it's only luke warm.... I think I have solved this by shutting the ball valve ever so slightly more but only time will tell.
Included a pic of how little the ball valve needs to be open to allow the tanks to be heated and still get hot water everywhere else in the house at the moment.
Hope this helps some
A sieve? Sorry I don’t know what that is haha ??
My Rotary Drum Filter is an Aqua Exclusive and the delivery from pentaires was exceptional, guy dropped it off from the truck and used a pallet jack to drop it right in my garage. It took about three weeks but for the price there’s no comparison.You could turn the temperature up on the hot water heater so the water exiting the tank is hotter, this may decrease efficiency of the hot water heater but will heat up your fish tank faster which means the recirculating pump will be used less. Do you have any check-valves anywhere in the system? My other thought was that water is traveling in the wrong direction somewhere in your system causing the fish tank heater to not be a full loop back to the hot water heater?
Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.
This is a sieve. But I just learned about a rotary drum filter as well, so thank you! Love the tub!A sieve? Sorry I don’t know what that is haha ??
Oh ok ya I've seen that before those are pretty cool I've never known anyone that's used them before but if they do the job the price point is definitely appealing. Only thing I ever advise against for filtration are bead filters, man what a pain those little bastards are, but a lot of folks have good results with them.
Thanks for the support, hope to see a big project of yours one day!
So I wanted to give everyone an update on my 405 or more a "what not to do!"
When I setup my system as you can tell from the pictures I stopped down my piping all to 1 1/2 in pipe. I did this with the thinking in my head that because the outlets of my Barracuda pump was naturally 1 1/2 that I would just keep everything the same... big mistake!
The small pipes on the return caused my rntire system to not work properly and set off my RDF at random times as well as having little to no flow in my tank because I had to close my ball valve down so much as to not starve my filter.
Needless to say, 300 dollars later to fix my mess up heres the results. And thankfully now everything is working!
Word of advice even tho the ladies will lie and tell you different, bigger is always better ?
When I setup my system as you can tell from the pictures I stopped down my piping all to 1 1/2 in pipe. I did this with the thinking in my head that because the outlets of my Barracuda pump was naturally 1 1/2 that I would just keep everything the same... big mistake!
The small pipes on the return caused my rntire system to not work properly and set off my RDF at random times as well as having little to no flow in my tank because I had to close my ball valve down so much as to not starve my filter.
Needless to say, 300 dollars later to fix my mess up heres the results. And thankfully now everything is working!
Word of advice even tho the ladies will lie and tell you different, bigger is always better ?
Did you have a smaller diameter pipe for your inlet than for your outlet? I've heard if your inlet diameter is smaller it will cause cavitation and it sounds like that's what was happening to you. But if you had 1.5" diameter on both inlet and outlet, I don't see why that wouldn't work unless you had a lot of 90degree corners on the inlet restricting the flow to the point it cavitated as well.
Let’s see if I can intelligently respond to this right now lol, so the inlets and the outlets were both 1.5 yes, and the system did in fact work to a degree as in it would bring water to the filter and expel it to the tank with no issue. However the float valve that controls the drum would trigger the drum to spray itself because the returns were not allowing the proper flow through the drum filter, therefore it would continue to clean itself too fast for the auto top off to keep up with.
Now that the returns are opened up there is enough constant flow to keep the floats afloat even after it sprays itself and the little water coming in from the house keeps it at the same level.
