220 plumbing setup

[jakanala01]

Hello Everyone My name is Ken

Waiting for the delivery of a 220 Perfecto and wanted to know how the plumbing setup would work on a 220 Perfecto if anyone has one or setup similar to one. I did see the thread by Mojo and looking to duplicate it.

Any other good ideas or suggestions greatly appreciated.

 

[btkrausen]

Its all up to how you want to do it. You can get as complicated or as simple as you want/need.

The simplest plumbing is simply a drain and a return pipe, granted you are running a sump. Then you can get into running a closed loop, which was require more plumbing. Another thing to consider is the use of Ts and ball valves to use to run reactors in the sump area. I'm currently moving from using a Maxijet to creating a "manifold" off the main return, so I use the same pump for return, carbon reactor, GFO reactor, and return line to my frag tank. To me, fewer pumps are better, less money to buy many pumps, less electricity, fewer plugs to plug in and out.

 

[btkrausen]

Oh, and for your drain inside the tank, make sure you look into a durso pipe. It keep the drain silent, yet functional. You can find ideas online, and build it with a few parts from Lowes for a couple dollars or less.

Basically, its a T on its tall end, with a cap on one end, and then a 90 elbow on the other. Drill a small hole in the cap for air, and you'll have a nice and silent drain. No gurgling sounds in the living room

I also put a piece of gutter guard inside the elbow to stop any fishes from going down the "slide" and ending up in the sump

 

[mizzoumed02]

It all depends on what your wanting to keep in the tank. I'd say go to the extreme right off the bat, that way you don't look back a few months down the road and say " I wish I would have." If I were doing it, I'd do me two drains, one in each of the back corners, if it's not coming drilled. I would then do a close loop system on it also. As btkrausen stated, get a huge return pump and build a manifold system to feed all your other reactors and extra's. I've stared doing that on all my tanks and it works great. If you go to the blog section and look at the 40 gal frag tank I'm working on, you can see how I built the manifold system for it.

 

[aalvarado87]

make sure you get the union valves. I failed do this and have a pain in the butt trying to mess with my plumbing. Mine is extremely simple one return and one drain. It was not that hard. I see some guys with like closed loops wow those are what you call some intense plumbing. If you can get it all set up outside and give it a wet test so you can find leaks. I didn't and ended up having a leak talk about a pain after a bottle of that pvc glue and a few hours i fixed it.

 

[bulkhead]

Don't skimp on valves and unions. A year down the road when you need to clean your return pump (or other equipment) you don't want to have to cut PVC. A union can save a lot of trouble and a valve can save a lot of water on the floor.....

 

[aalvarado87]

i hear that bulkhead i did that and i am seriously dreading changing up my plumbing which i will be doing this summer I really feel that it is going to kick my butt. I didnt look much into it though and jsut plumbed it it was my frist drilled tank so i didnt have that much of a clue anyhow now i am really regretting it btw what are those zoas in your avatar.

 

[bulkhead]

Those are UnKnown. I pulled an odd ball single polyp off a very typical zoa frag and grew it out to two polyps. Slow growing, I forgot about it for a long time and then it caught my eye in the frag tank. Thanks for asking.

 

[swannyson7]

Not trying to hijack the thread... but don't those look kind of like oxides?

As for the plubing question... I would look through some of the build threads under the "member tanks" section to get some ideas and draw everything up on paper before you start assembly. I failed to do that when I plumbed my tank and I won't even tell you how many trips it took to home depot and how many extra parts I bought that are now just sitting in my tool shed.