Surge tank experience?

[danny zubot]

I've been thinking of using an old 5 gallon tank to try my hand at a scaled down model of the Waikiki surge tank design. Has anyone ever built one of these? How do they work for you?

[Pescador]

I haven't tried one myself, and I realize your looking for hands on experience. but...
You probably have already done a search for the Carlson surge device.

Here's one link http://petsforum.com/personal/trevor...ge_device.html

The Dana Riddle version uses a 5 gallon tank.
http://http://www.breedersregistry.o...mple_surge.htm

There's some info (8 pages) in The Reef Aquarium Vol.3. If you want to see it let me know.

[Delphinus]

Haven't tried the Carlson surge, did try a toilet flapper surge a few years back and it worked well for while. I eventually stopped it though because the float kept getting jammed in the bucket I was using.

There's no getting away from bubbles with surge devices (you can minimize them though, of course, but not really eliminate them) so there is some increased salt spray on your glass and so on.

But they're a great method to shake things up in a tank .. I keep wanting to go back to having a surge tank or two on a tank.

The nice thing about the Carlson surges are no moving parts, so as long as you can get it tuned right it should work awesome.

[honkey sauce]

ive got one and dont use it anymore.You shouldnt waste your time and money one when you could buy a tunze powerhead with controller,way better.more water movement and more random

[Dale]

Hey Danny,

I'm going to try one of the toilet flappers (two actually) on my temperate reef. Let's compare notes down the road.

[danny zubot]

I can see how these designs would create bubbles. I think the size of bubbles could be adjusted by using a larger sized air line. (#3 above) This would make larger bubbles and thus rise out of the water faster.

I thought about trying a flapper style surge, but mechanical parts = more room for malfunction. The design used at Waikiki soesn't use any moving parts, so if I can get it working it should stay working.

[Joe Reefer]

Originally Posted by danny zubot

so if I can get it working it should stay working.

Those are some famous last words.

Has anyone seen the georgia aquarium surge device in their reef display? Its like a couple of dump trucks unloading all at once. Very cool looking but not feasilbe in anything less than a 10000 or so gallon system.

[Delphinus]

Yeah that is amazing to see..

There used to be a commercially available "turf scrubber" that worked on the same "dump tank" principle. Haven't seen one in years though.

[WWWD]

Rikko used to run a flapper style on on his tank, I think he said it worked pretty well but was noisy.

OA back in the day also used to run a fairly sizable surge device on one of their 4x8 holding tanks, Im not sure what method they used but it was a pain in the ass when you were looking at a coral to buy and every 60 seconds a wash a bubbles clouded out the tank and you had to wait for it to clear.

[Pescador]

Originally Posted by danny zubot

I can see how these designs would create bubbles. I think the size of bubbles could be adjusted by using a larger sized air line. (#3 above) This would make larger bubbles and thus rise out of the water faster.

Here's some info from Delbeek in RA3

First he talks about extending the air line (8) down so it ended just above the inlet to the main siphon.

"Solving bubble generation
To solve this problem the air evacuation line (3) was moved into the CSD and placed at the very top of the inside elbow (8) instead of near the bottom of the outlet pipe in the tank. This should be the point where suction is the greatest and introducing air at this point, should cause the siphon to break rapidly. Another mod was to cut the end of the siphon pipe (2) with two 45 degree angles to look like an arrowhead. A side benefit has been a significant decrease in noise due to elimination of slurping at the end of the cycle."



Hope this helps.