IM MiniMax Reactor - Is it supposed to be this noisy?

Calm Blue Ocean · Sep 2, 2020

I decided to test out my MiniMax (midsize) reactor last night and I'm really hoping that I'm doing this wrong. This thing drips and drops and splooshes and whatever other odd water sounds you can think of. I can put up with the hum and vibration of the pump but the water sounds are not reasonable at all. Anyone with one of these reactors have any suggestions? I'm wondering if the desktop version might be quieter. I'm using it for carbon if that makes any difference. Thanks for any input!

Kris 2020 · Sep 4, 2020

Bump it up...someone must know

Calm Blue Ocean · Sep 5, 2020

Thanks for the bump. I found one thread on R2R where someone wanted to try modding the reactor to shorten the tube. His feeling was that it sticks too far out of the water and that this is the source of noise. In the end he decided to just stop using it.

On the bright side, I think I've found a work around until someone can tell me that the water sound is really because I'm doing it wrong lol. Turns out the sponge prefilter guards from my old eFlux wave pumps fit snuggly around the inner tube of the reactor, allowing the tube to still fit perfectly into the outer tube. At the lower flow rate for carbon this course sponge doesn't seem to back things up at all but breaks up the water flow enough to remove all the running water and splashing sounds! The ideas a person will come up with at 1am (a sane person might have just unplugged it for the night).

So now that I eliminated the splashing I am also considering replacing the pump since (now that I can hear it) it seems louder than it needs to be. Fortunately that looks super easy to do since the pump is just a normal pump, no weird proprietary stuff. Would be nice to find a tiny DC pump with an external flow control to make the reactor easier to adjust.