Plumbing suddenly noisy

[treesprite]

There was work in the building that required a turning off of electricity momentarily several times in about an hour. Now my plumbing in my external overflow is noisy as heck. I messed around with the valves, took apart the pipes inside the box and made various adjustments trying to solve the problem. Just can't get it quiet again. It makes no sense. This is a BA in an external box, fed from the internal overflow. If anyone has any ideas about why a power outage would lead to this sudden change, please do tell.

 

Edited September 10, 2020 by treesprite
Typos due to broken phone screen

[AlanM]

Can you see which pipes in the BA the water is going down?  You might need to purge the air out of the full siphon line to get it to restart. Especially if it doesn’t go straight down. When it happened to me I would open the full siphon valve a lot down by the sump until it flushed and got the water and air moving really fast down it.  Then I would close it slowly until the bubbles stopped coming and it got quiet again.

[Jon Lazar]

What exactly is noisy?  Waterfall into the overflow box?  Running water sound in your secondary drain?  Gurgling/flushing sounds from the overflow creating siphon and then breaking it?  Splash into the sump? 

 

Several little things can change the flow balance of a BA.  The drain and return pipes get coated with bacterial slime and sponges, which can either increase or decrease flow.  Starts and stops can dislodge little sponges or other critters in the pipes that used to block flow slightly.  Debris or sponges can partially block your gate valve opening (which are often mostly closed) then get blown clear by starts and stops.  But all of this should be fixable by tweaking the gate valve to rebalance the flow.  Can't you adjust the gate valve to make it quiet again?

 

 

[treesprite]

Thank you for the help! 

 

I just now switched the caps on the pipes. I didn't realize I had used a cap with a hole on the second siphon but not the main one, but now I remember messing with that when I originally set up. So when the water was just going down the second, it was very noisy. When I took the pipes in the box apart (and cut them down  slightly), I put them back in switched because I ended up cutting too much off from the scond (which of course can't be lower than the first). I wasn't thinking about the caps. As soon as I switched the caps, instant dead silence. Thank goodness.

Edited September 10, 2020 by treesprite

[AlanM]

In the "classic" beananimal design the second drain has a hole in the top and a piece of tube attached so it lets air in when it's running as an "open channel" and just allowing a small (and silent) amount of water that isn't going down the full siphon to run down the walls of the pipe.  The other end of the tubing in the hold curves down to just below the tank rim and sits above the normal water surface. 

 

This lets it close off to the air and turn into a second full siphon if the water level gets too high from the main full siphon getting clogged.

[treesprite]

On 9/11/2020 at 1:23 PM, AlanM said:

In the "classic" beananimal design the second drain has a hole in the top and a piece of tube attached so it lets air in when it's running as an "open channel" and just allowing a small (and silent) amount of water that isn't going down the full siphon to run down the walls of the pipe.  The other end of the tubing in the hold curves down to just below the tank rim and sits above the normal water surface. 

 

This lets it close off to the air and turn into a second full siphon if the water level gets too high from the main full siphon getting clogged.

 

Thanks, Alan. I have the hole, but left off the tubing. I have always thought the tubing was just to prevent noise. If my water level is so high that I get that much water in the second drain, I want some way of being alerted right away - the noise is my alert.