Too much piping?

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J

JLad10687

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Apr 25, 2008
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Pennsylvania
I am going to be setting up a 150 gallon tank. What I want to do is build my own wet/dry however I want the actual filter components to be in the basement. I want the water from the overflow to travel about 20' down into the basement where I will have the actual filter parts set up.

Will this be too far?
Will I need to compensate by buying a stronger pump for the return line?
Any other suggestions?

Post pics if you have a similar set up.

Thanks.
 
Yes you will need to buy a pump that is able to handle the excessive head pressure... not all pumps handle head pressure the same so be sure to read the flow rates at the lift elevation you will have...

Other than that it should pretty much work the same, just longer pipes...
 
How many GPH do you think I would need to do this? I saw a pond pump rated at 5200 GPH, with 5' of head it was 4100. At that rate, does it mean that at 20' it would be 800 GPH? If need be, I could probably make a system so it runs under the fishtank, just trying to figure out what the best option is as I would prefer to run it into the basement.
 
20' are you sure?Its the actual difference in height you have to worry about not the length of pipe
 
Lets say the over flow was at 5'. Thats 5' to the ground then about 6' to the sump in the basement. This would be a difference of 11' but I imagine it would take about 20' of piping to accomplish this.
 
Actually you do need to consider all the pipes and fittings when calculating head pressure.

And no just because a pump is 5200 @ 5' doesn't mean it's 800 @ 20'. Check the pumps flow chart for exact numbers. Some pump can only pump up to 12' head pressure some go to 30' they are all different.

Also don't forget that 20' of pipe holds a ton of water, so make the sump large enough to handle all the overflow drainage when the power is off otherwise you will have a flood.

Look into the Sequence/Reeflo pumps, and just google a head loss calculator (Reef central has one) to determine the exact amount of head pressure you will be looking at.
 
I would think the affect of water viscosity & number of pipe fittings would be negligible. If it's a sealed line the pressure on the filter effluent will be nearly matched by the pressure of the filter influent- thus you'll have no problems with a normal or only slightly oversized pump. If the system isn't sealed though, you'll need a very strong pump to push that water up that high. The length of the pipe is much less of a concern then the vertical distance of the run.

Another benefit of a sealed system is that you won't have to worry about all the water in the line overflowing the filter tank in the event of a power failure. If it's an open system though you'll definitely want to take that into consideration.
 
I used to have a similar setup to what you describe in my old house. My tank sat directly above the tank. It probably only used 15' of return piping, but the head height (water level in sump versus water level in tank) was the same - about 11'. I used an Iwaki MD70RLT, I think it did about 800 GPH.

My new setup has the sump in the crawl space (no basement in my new house) so the head height is only about 7'. The same pump does about 1200 GPH at this height.

I attached a couple pictures from the setup the way it is now - I don't have any photos from my old house.

wall.jpg

sump.jpg
 
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