Motti's 265 inwall Display + Fishroom build

[motti]

I have been waiting for this moment for a while now, been in planning for over a year now and we have finally started turning the utility room into a fish room today.

 

I am planning to document the build process as much as possible and will start posting pictures once the stand is complete and there are more to show.

 

Planned Equipment:

Display Tank:  84x30x25 Acrylic tank with side C2C overflow (ordered from Artfully Acrylic about a month ago)

Sump:             53x24x20 Acrylic tank, also ordered from artfully acrylic

Skimmer:        ASM G5, been in a box for over a year, can't wait to get it wet already.

Going to use two Jebao wp40s to start, might add more in the future. 

DC12000 as the return pump.

 

Lighting: going to go with the Lumia 5.1 (maybe 5.2) tested the 5.1 on my RSM and i like it so far. Started developing a custom web control software to control everything.

 

Will keep this thread going during the construction and build phase, this might take couple of months until the system sees water.

Edited February 23, 2014 by motti

[YHSublime]

Standing by. Sounds awesome so far!

[flooddc]

Nice!!! following along

[AlanM]

Nice sounding build.  When is the tank getting dropped off?

[sachabballi reef]

looking forward to watching this come together!

[motti]

Nice sounding build.  When is the tank getting dropped off?

 

Thanks, I think it should be ready in the next month or so, maybe a little longer.

[motti]

Update:

 

Stand is about ready

 

 

 

 

Plumbing and electric are complete too, dry wall going next

[Sharkey18]

Congrats. So exciting. 

[ArtFully Acrylic (Adam B)]

Just saw the thread Motti!  Looking forward to building the tank soon!  Moving up in queue!  I definitely approve of the stand build .  Even though you used 2x4's exclusively you went super robust with the horizontal stringers in the top frame...AND two layers of 3/4" ply for the top.  That will be well more than sufficient for the tank so good job!!  Also love all of the pocket screw joinery used exclusively.  Many may miss this, but I certainly didn't.  Well Done!! 

[motti]

Just saw the thread Motti!  Looking forward to building the tank soon!  Moving up in queue!  I definitely approve of the stand build .  Even though you used 2x4's exclusively you went super robust with the horizontal stringers in the top frame...AND two layers of 3/4" ply for the top.  That will be well more than sufficient for the tank so good job!!  Also love all of the pocket screw joinery used exclusively.  Many may miss this, but I certainly didn't.  Well Done!! 

 

Thanks Adam, was thinking about the stand for a while, since i won't need to store any equipment underneath the tank, I decided to go with the double ply and extra 2x4 supports. the stand is rock solid

 

Can't wait to see the tank comes together. I started working on passing the PVC pipes from where the tank will seat to where the sump will seat, I think I will end up using 1 1/2 for all pipes since the output diameter on the DC1200 is 1 1/2". I was wondering if I could move the pipe up and down as long as the end point will be lower then the start point in the overflow.

 

 

The stand is 40" high, and I assume that the bottom of the overflow would be at around 52-54" high.

 

the pipes on the right side of the picture are at about 48" inches tall, and would be at around 38-40" by the time the turn to the adjacent wall.

 

[ArtFully Acrylic (Adam B)]

Motti, full siphon systems such as the Bean Animal, as being used in your build, are not particularly fond of long horizontal runs so you may want to keep that in mind.  That being said, I'm still a bit confused by the pic as to the location of the tank, it's orientation, and how long the runs of pipe are that you will be running with the sump being positioned on the other side of the room.

[motti]

Adam, the aquarium will be positioned right in the other side of the water heater, the picture of the stand shows it better.

 

I would say that the drain pipe will probably run about 20' long in slight decline.

[motti]

Someone on RC set up a tank like that

 

[tomtom2245]

Welcome to the Bean Animal C2C club! I have that same system running on my tank and love how quiet it is. Can't wait to see the tank installed.

[AlanM]

So I have some experience running a Bean Animal with a long nearly horizontal run.  Mine drops about 1 foot over 9 feet.  And it doesn't have the ups and downs yours has.

 

A BeanAnimal design only works if all of the air can be flushed from the full siphon drain in fairly short order at the steady state flow rate that the return pump is delivering.  I went with the standard 1.5" piping and was pushing 750gpm through it, and it still wasn't enough flow through the system to purge all of the air out of the pipes in days of running to let it quiet down. 

 

In order to get the air out and make the BeanAnimal work I had to do one of two things:  either narrow the pipe or increase the size of the pump.  Both of them will increase the speed of the water in the pipe and move the air along.  I chose to increase the flow because it involved less replumbing.  I should have narrowed the pipe because now I have too much going into the tank, in my opinion.  20x turnover is kind of extreme. 

 

Anyway, that's what I had to do to get it to work with a horizontal run and a vertical drop to the basement.  You have much less of a vertical drop than me.  I'm not sure if this helps or hurts you, but it seems like maybe you won't have to have your gate valve closed as much as I do because of my large weight of water pushing down from the large vertical drop.  So I'm not sure of the answer if you choose to design your drain like that with the ups and downs, but I wish you luck and am urge you to have a plan B for where you want to put the sump if you have to redo it because your BeanAnimal drain doesn't work like that.

[motti]

Thanks Tom and Allen,

 

Great info, I might end up going with 1" for the siphon, and have the largest vertical drop on that one.

 

The only option B would be to put the sump under the tank, but I want to avoid that option at all costs if possible. Want the basement area to be quite as possible.

 

I am headed back to sketch up right now, will post some updated plumbing designs probably some time tomorrow.

 

Had to modify the sump size and most likely make it into 52x24x20 in order to place it on another wall

 

 

 

Some pictures of where I want to pass the plumbing through

 

 

 

 

Sink area:

 

Wall drawing that illustrates the estimated height of the overflow/aquarium/plumbing

 

 

[AlanM]

I've been thinking more about BeanAnimal startup with a "U" shaped part of the drain pipe.  You're essentially building two P traps into the drain by doing what you plan to do.  I know what you plan is not as extreme as the image you posted from ReefCentral, but I predict that it isn't going to work well or at all. 

 

At startup, when you turn on the pump you'll have two long air bubbles that will need to be pushed out the sump end of the pipe.  The first will be the bubble between the overflow end of the full siphon and the first downward leg of the "U" portion of your pipe.  The water flowing over the overflow will have to push all of the water out of the "U" of the pipe by pushing on the air bubble that is between the U and the overflow drain.  It will have to do this with just a few inches of water since you can't allow the water level in the tank to just keep rising forever and eventually it will start running into your emergency. 

 

In addition to this, you have to push out the second bubble that is between the sump end of the "U" portion and the water level of the sump.  A BeanAnimal requires that the sump end of the full siphon remain just barely underwater at all times.  If it doesn't, then air from on top of the sump will keep bubbling up into the drain while the water is trying to come out and form a siphon.  So you'll have air from there to push out as well. 

 

Neither of those will probably happen.  The first bubble won't have enough water height to start pushing it along because you would need as much water height over the drain as you have height in your upwards leg of the "U" portion.  I doubt you want your overflow box that low if you're having Adam do an external box out the back of the tank.  Maybe this part would work if you did the drain in the bottom of the tank with basically a traditional full height overflow box instead of the smaller out-the-back ones that are more common for custom tanks because that would let you drain right from the bottom of the tank and have a large height above the drain. 

 

The second bubble on the sump side will allow the pipe to fill up partially with water and will come out in dribs and drabs over some period of time.  Each slug of air you get out will increase your flow through the full siphon because it will have the same effect as increasing the diameter of your pipe.  During that whole time your BA drain will be making all kinds of noise because it's tuned so that the full siphon handles the flow and the open channel and emergency make up for it just at startup.  So basically the BA open channel drain is noisy until all of the air is out of the system and the full siphon is running at full capacity because only then can the open channel transition down to "film" flow where the water just runs down the edges of the open channel pipe instead of "flushing the toilet" with slugs of water and air travelling through.

 

The TL;DR version is: You cannot have any portion of a full siphon run going upwards and horizontal or nearly-horizontal is also discouraged.  The second rule is that since you will want your open channel to convert into a full siphon if the original one fails and the emergency can't keep up with the startup flow that one can't have any upwards runs either.  The third rule is that every big of solid doodoo that comes out of your tank will sit in the bottom of that U and eventually clog it. 

[ArtFully Acrylic (Adam B)]

Alan, you are correct that the U and long almost horizontal runs won't work.  Motti and I started discussing it shortly after I saw those first pics.  The sump location is being moved, and changed in size as a result, to eliminate these problems.

 

But I also wanted to say thank you for such a detailed reply.  Many of those issues were known in my head and a few weren't even considered so you have quite an expansive range of thought there .  Made my head spin lol, but awesome info for everyone to see and use in future consideration =)

[AlanM]

Adam, sadly, I now have lots of experience on non-functional BA drain systems.  I've now done the wrong thing twice.  (1. built it with a long horizontal run and ignored advice to make the drain smaller and 2. fixed it by adding a huge pump instead of downsizing the drain.)

 

Sometimes it's liberating to realize that you can serve society best as a counterexample to others.

 

Frankly I think the right solution would be for you to just make him a huge wraparound acrylic tank that is long enough to extend to his desired sump area. 8)

[motti]

Thank Allen, had to read it few times to grasp all the great info, I just spent about an hour or so in the new fish room, and i think i'll be able to pass the plumbing without the need for a U turn in the middle.

 

I had hard time drawing pipes in sketch-up, so i turned to photoshop

 

The total drop is 30" from the bottom of the overflow to the top of the sump (drain pipes won't be at the bottom of the overflow, couple inches above i assume), also they will drain deeper into the sump.

 

How would that work? the first drop of about 12 inches vertical drop, and then another 18 over about 20', would that work any better?

 

Back View:

 

Top View:

 

Link to the sketchup model if anyone want more information:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fm2psrcxrw2ud0c/sump.skp

 

Thanks!

Edited January 7, 2014 by motti

[motti]

Would you guys recommend that i go with 1" for the siphon and 1" for the open channel and 1.5" inches for the emergency? assuming the long distance between the sump and tank.

 

I think the return pump would most likely push 1500 gph with overhead.

Edited January 8, 2014 by motti

[AlanM]

Go as large as you can handle for open channel and emergency. Open channel needs lots of open space inside so the water can stick to the walls instead of going down the middle. Maybe one inch for full siphon would work to speed the flow up for that one, but there is no reason to ever downsize the others.

 

Bulkhead size isnt super important, I think. Maybe Adam can decide on what holes and layout work best for the tank he is making.

[ArtFully Acrylic (Adam B)]

Adam, sadly, I now have lots of experience on non-functional BA drain systems.  I've now done the wrong thing twice.  (1. built it with a long horizontal run and ignored advice to make the drain smaller and 2. fixed it by adding a huge pump instead of downsizing the drain.)

 

Sometimes it's liberating to realize that you can serve society best as a counterexample to others.

 

Frankly I think the right solution would be for you to just make him a huge wraparound acrylic tank that is long enough to extend to his desired sump area. 8)

 

By being a counterexample AND trudging forward to success you have liberated yourself well Alan =).  LOL on the wraparound tank Alan!  This is already a great sized tank!  That wraparound would just be insane.

 

Would you guys recommend that i go with 1" for the siphon and 1" for the open channel and 1.5" inches for the emergency? assuming the long distance between the sump and tank.

 

I think the return pump would most likely push 1500 gph with overhead.

 

Motti, with the new more detailed drawings I see quite clearly your intentions.  This won't work for you.  Do you have any drawings yet showing the new proposed location on the modified sump you asked me about?  I suppose keeping it here will help all that many more people in the future so may as well make it educational to all .

 

From the proposed drawings, you will have way to much horizontal run on this.  I had a customer who setup their bean wrong by flipping the sump around backwards from the intended design (I did the whole build...Tank/Sump/Stand/Canopy) and it presented issues with the siphon priming.  In this case, the tank was 6ft long with overflow on one end (like yours).  Per the intended design the drains were to come into the sump directly under the overflow basically.  However, the customer turned the sump around the other way and ran the drains across to the other end...less than 6 feet...with only a slight decline in plumbing over that run.  The siphon didn't work correctly at all.  

 

The cause in their case was luckily only that the drain pipes went too far under the water surface when entering the sump (so as you mention in your case, you don't want to do this...The Primary and Secondary Drains should end ideally 1-2 inches under the sump's normal operating water level.  For emergency, I like to set it up above the water to give an audible notification of an issue if presented, but that's my preference).  By shortening these we were able to resolve the issue.  However, I attribute the success to a high powered return pump.  The pump was sufficiently sized to negate the horizontal run...so they weren't forced to turn the sump back around to the originally designed direction.

 

In your case, this run is just too long in my opinion.  I see two "safe" options to eliminate the need to test the theory in your situation.  One, let's see where your adjusted sump size proposed location is and how you would run the plumbing.  Two, you could make this a non-siphon system with two primary's and one emergency over the current proposed length.  Using the 1 1/2" PVC you should still see more than sufficient turnover to keep up with your spec'd return pump...though it will have more noise.  However, I don't think you will hear much of it from the tank side of the wall.

[motti]

Go as large as you can handle for open channel and emergency. Open channel needs lots of open space inside so the water can stick to the walls instead of going down the middle. Maybe one inch for full siphon would work to speed the flow up for that one, but there is no reason to ever downsize the others.

 

Bulkhead size isnt super important, I think. Maybe Adam can decide on what holes and layout work best for the tank he is making.

 

Thanks Allen, going to let Adam decide on the bulkhead sizing

[motti]

 

 

Motti, with the new more detailed drawings I see quite clearly your intentions.  This won't work for you.  Do you have any drawings yet showing the new proposed location on the modified sump you asked me about?  I suppose keeping it here will help all that many more people in the future so may as well make it educational to all .

 

 

Hi Adam, That's the modified location the other location was on the far wall, you can see in the skethup i sent you. If you have time, I could stop by your shop tomorrow and discuss in person. 

Edited January 8, 2014 by motti