280g Inwall

[StirCrazy]

you know tony. the whole gasket on the water side isn't nessasarly true, the gasket has to stay on the originaly intended side or you get leakage through the threds.. what I did when i put a bulkhead in backwards was leave the gasket on the outside then I put a smear of silicone on both sides of the glass and gasket. the silicone wasn't realy to seal it, but rather to prevent anything from getting lose. I did do a test befor the silicone was applied and gasket on the outside worked. if you look at it you'll see why. you have the two faces, the bulkhead flat, and the glass creating a perfect seal.. if you have the gasket on the nutside it gets twisted and deformed as you put the bulkhead in, and will leak a good chunk of the time as the threads are not sealed.

Steve

[Delphinus]

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

you know tony. the whole gasket on the water side isn't nessasarly true, the gasket has to stay on the originaly intended side or you get leakage through the threds.. what I did when i put a bulkhead in backwards was leave the gasket on the outside then I put a smear of silicone on both sides of the glass and gasket. the silicone wasn't realy to seal it, but rather to prevent anything from getting lose. I did do a test befor the silicone was applied and gasket on the outside worked. if you look at it you'll see why. you have the two faces, the bulkhead flat, and the glass creating a perfect seal.. if you have the gasket on the nutside it gets twisted and deformed as you put the bulkhead in, and will leak a good chunk of the time as the threads are not sealed.

Steve

Thanks Steve, good explanation or at least it makes sense to me when I stop to think about it. The gasket was definitely pretty unhappy under the threadnut. I'll try it again with the gasket on the outside.

I've never really liked threadnuts on the inside, they get caked up with feather dusters and calcium deposits and the whole bit and if/when you try to remove the bulkhead it's always harder than it has to be because of it. I'd rather keep the bulkhead with the threads on the outside but it might push the pipe out too far and push the skimmer out, 1" further out and that stupid effluent pipe won't reach unless I cut it and elongate it. Although I wonder if I could just make the skimmer stand a little higher and have the pipe clear under it and call it a day on that one.

[Delphinus]

Skimmer feed redux:


Like my 3/4" to 1-1/4" union and a valve?? Man that took trips to Canadian Tire, Home Depot and Rona just to get the pieces. Had to use a 1-1/2" valve and 1-1/2" union because I couldn't find enough connectors to make 1-1/4" throughout work. Nobody had threaded-to-threaded reducing bushings and nobody had 1-1/4" close nippes so 1-1/2" it had to be, slip to thread reducing bushings. Oh well, other than it feels enormous for the size it could have been, at least it should be functional.

Where things are at now:


Still lots of stuff on the catwalk but I'll get to cleaning that up later. The yellow 1/4" line was coming off my RO/DI reservoir so I could fill up the sump faster (the RO/DI was on and the reservoir was draining). Still took bloody forever to fill, but I did get it filled and turned the sump return pump on for the first time tonight.

So the good news there is even at full bore the wavebox does not cause the waves to slap up, against, or over the Eurobracing as I had been concerned about all along. HOLY CRAP! Did I understand that right? Something DIDN'T screw up??? Yikes, call it a day and FAST. So, pumps are currently off for the time being until I figure out what's next on the task list.

Interestingly, once the pump got turned on and the water level rose in the display tank, the amplitude of the wave diminished significantly. It seems it's well above the sweet spot of the wavebox. The wavebox itself cannot be raised because it's butted up against the Eurobracing so it could be that I'll never really have a big wave in the tank anyhow. Oh well, as long as I can get some kind of back and forth whoosh whoosh going in there, I will be happy, the actual height of the wave is more of a novelty anyhow to me.

Just as a footnote to other things that happened this week:

- The bike spokes idea appear to be working. I have a working powerhead again on the left side of the cube!

- Since I had nothing to lose on the broken needlewheel impeller anyhow for the Bubble Magus skimmer on the carpet tank, I broke off the remaining pieces of the needlewheel disk so all I had was the magnet shaft. Then I cut a little plastic circle out of some plastic I found, glued that to the impeller shaft using Weldon-16, and then cut out some circles from some leftover Enkamat I had lying around. I meshmod'd my BM100! Haha, woot! I have a working skimmer again on that tank. And after 1 day it seems to be kicking butt too. Well, it's certainly kicking butt over when it wasn't working at all, if nothing else.

[Rbacchiega]

yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Waves are kinda "meh" to me...I know I know..I must be weird. But I had a pretty good one going in the shop and all it did was stir up my fine sand....I mean, it was neat and all, but ReefCrest mode is my sweet lover. And I ended up turning down the vortech to about 60%...ah well.

Get rock in that beast already will ya!?

[Lance]

Whoooo Hoooo! A successful day with no mishaps!
Makes it all worth while eh Tony? One more day like that and you'll forget all about the bad stuff.
Not far off now my friend.

[michika]

Wow, this is really coming along here now. I kind of snickered at your pump plumbing, but only because I have something that looks disturbingly similar on my skimmer too! I like the colour of the flex, the blue is very pretty.

Congrats on getting your wavebox to work for you!

[Delphinus]

The .. blue? Oh you mean the hose from the pump to the skimmer? That's not spaflex, that's some ribbed tubing that matches the 1-1/4" skimmer intake. The skimmer came with it, I don't know what it is or where Chin even got it from. Suppose I should ask him. Looks like vacuum hose to me, the last time I used something like that though it leaked like crazy no matter what I did with it. Hopefully this stuff doesn't.

In the picture the 2" pipe that leads to the Dart and the 1.5" pipe coming out of it is spaflex, as is the 8" section that leads to the first elbow on the skimmer feed. From a distance it looks the same as white PVC but if you see it close up you can see it's a spiral of soft white plastic PVC. It's not as flexible as clear vinyl (which you have to use hose barbs for) but it does have a fair bit of give and it just cements into regular PVC fittings using regular PVC cement. BTW at Western Pump you can get clear primer and clear cement for PVC - makes for much nicer and cleaner plumbing work than the usual purple and grey stuff.

[Parker]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

Where things are at now:

Hey Tony,

I'm not sure how high you will be running your return chamber:

I had mine set up much the same way and was having issues with the dart pulling air from the surface and blowing bubbles all over the tank. I had to change out the strainer for an elbow. By the looking at the hight of your baffles you probably won't run into that problem, just thought I'd mention it.

[Delphinus]

Oh ok good to know, thanks. In that picture the sump hasn't filled yet but under normal circumstances I'll have the water level straight across so the intake is a good 8" submerged. An elbow is an easy fix - worst case scenario and if I don't have enough space for an elbow I could make take a length of pipe and drill holes into it and thus spread out the intake over the width of that whole section.

Right now there is still a massive amount of air bubbles drawn into the Herbie overflow so I have to retool that a bit. Was thinking of shortening the main drain so it sits much lower down, and then raising the emergency overflow as much as I can because right now there is a 4" level drop into the overflow and it's quite the waterfall. That should both create fewer bubbles and those that do still get created have to travel further down so hopefully that will do it. There are no microbubbles in FW but that of course could all change once it's SW. Also it would be nicer to further reduce the sloshing sounds. At least with the tank room door closed the sound is contained but seems to me a Herbie is supposed to be quiet as well as bubble free.

[Parker]

I run no piping on my main drain, just the bulk head on the bottom and my emergency is about even with the top of the overflow. The downside is my entire overflow drains when I shut the return down, but the sump is big enough to handle it. I would say my overflow probably holds 35/40 gallons.