I have come to the point of thinking that a switching return is almost a waist of time when you look at the cost involved. I personaly am back to the point that instead of recreating a area where the waves crash and pound but rather a tidle surge area where you have a strong current that is predomantly in one direction with the odd eddy (like the ocean side of the reef) but you have to see if there is a max flow rate the switcher can handle and base it off of that. another important thing to find out is how big the internal passages are and how many will be open at once as this will determin the max flow rate you can put through it and going with a bigger pump would be a waist of money.

Steve

Dave,
On a closed loop your head pressure is almost nil, so what's that pump supposed to put out at 0' head?

Mitch

They say the 4-way can handle over 8000gph. So With what you said what do you think is the best way to set up my tank. As how should i go about trying to achive the water movment for SPS.

You could always go for a smaller, pressure rated pump and use Eductors or Penductors instead.

Could you explain educators and pendators?

Mitch
4300gph- There will be 8 one inch outlets, two will always be on at one time. Trying to create a side to side sort of wave action in my fish whirl pool :eek:

Dave

A Penductor and Eductor work basically the same way. A Penductor is a little bit smaller though. It works a lot like a venturi actually. Basically what happens is the water coming out of the pump is restricted to a small opening thus increasing the velocity of the water. With the increased velocity, a low pressure area is created and the surrounding water is sucked in as well. It is supposedly able to increase the flow from an outlet by 5x or so. Therefore, even with a smaller pump (say only pumping out 800GPH per outlet), you could theoretically get it up to 4000GPH/outlet with the use of an eductor.

Unfortunately, this process created quite a bit of back pressure, so you'll most likely need a good pressure rated pump to use the optimally. The eductors themselves are quite bulky as well.

As for the Penductor, iirc, littlesilvermax on the forum here uses them on his tank with an OM 4-way, so I'd hit him up for some "real world" impressions of it.

Here is a link with much more info:

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/sh...hreadid=372881

Hey Dave & Sean ... I was using penductors on the closed loops on my old 300G ... if you want more info on them let me know.

So if those are penductors what do educators look like?