Tank dimensions

[paulojbsilva]

Hi everybody.

After moving to a new home, I had to let my old tank go, as it was too big for my actual living room. Thought I could keep without a reef tank...I was wrong.

So, I'm planning a new one, but smaller. Want to keep the Bean's Animal drain sistem with external CC overflow.

I'd like to know your opinion on the size of the tank and the size of the holles for the drain.

Thanks!!!

[paulojbsilva]

Hello?

[paulojbsilva]

ok, thanks anyway...

[GHill762]

looks good to me, I like cubes.. 3x 3/4 drain holes seems like a lot of drain, however I'm not real familiar with the beananimal drain setup.. if that's the drain you're familiar with, go with it.. should look pretty nice..

[paulojbsilva]

Well, the drains won't be full siphon at all time, except in an emergency. I will be 1 on full syphon, 1 handling the flow the first one can't take, and the third just in case the other 2 gets clogged. It's a fail safe sistem. Hope it won't be much of a flow, but I'm putting valves to control them.

Hope that because the tanks is so small, it wont take much money to have enough light to have some acros and so...still trying to figure that out.

Thanks.

[jestep]

Personally, I don't think I'd bother will a full bean setup on that size tank. 2 - 3/4" drains running vented should be more than enough, or 1 - 1" primary and 1 - 3/4" both run vented.

 

Full siphon 3/4 pvc will pull about 4150Lph / 1100 gph at 36" of height. This tank is roughly 80L / 21 gallons. To run a siphon in this, you're looking at a 52 time hourly turnover through the sump. You'll likely have to throttle the siphon drain a lot to get this to work properly which greatly increases the chances of getting a clogged line. In any case I wouldn't go less than 3/4" just to reduce the chances of getting blockages.

[paulojbsilva]

Well, that's something I haven't thought. One of my primary goals is to have zero noise, complete silent. Do you think a setup with 2 drains will be silent?

[jestep]

I was running 2 vented on my 50 gallon and it was pretty much silent after about a week. It would occasionally gurgle until I got the return flow rate dialed in and a little biofilm built up on the PVC surfaces.

 

The 2 ways to get it silent are running vented somewhere around 30% flow or full siphon. I would think you could get it dialed in pretty easily on this size tank.

 

With that being said, if you want to put the time into it, the bean will obviously work, just seems a bit of overkill to me. You could also setup the bean and run it vented if the siphon doesn't work due to the flow rate.

[paulojbsilva]

Well, thanks. I'm still gathering info and deciding a plan. Also trying to see what sizes of tubbing I can buy here in Portugal.

Will keep an update of things in this thread.