Converting a durso to Bean Animal

[FishyFishy!]

Originally Posted by Seriak

That's an interesting thought. I thought all Bean Animals had a trickle overflow (Mine does)

Of course all of the bean animal setups have trickles... but in the same overflow! (I'm sure you only have one overflow with 3 pipes in it)

[nerdz]

Originally Posted by FishyFishy!

I think that the flow in the 'trickle' overflow would be so minimal that it would create a dead zone. It would be nothing but a nirate factory over time. Mind you, there are ways around that I guess (keeping the water moving/circulating), but they are more of a PITA than anything else.

The most probable scenario here would be to make two durso's with seperate drain plumbing. Same could go for Herbies, it would just be a little harder to fine tune. Get rid of the 2-into-1 valve there, and just make two different drain pipes into the sump.

If you made each overflow have a full siphon there would be no detritus buildup and full surface skimming. they could have strainers and be at bottom of overflow, (no stand pipe). there would be good water turnover and any detritus would end up in the sump/skimmer.

if the return pump ever failed you would only need enough volume in the sump to handle the volume of the overflows

[asylumdown]

Thanks for the responses guys!

To answer the main questions - yes, I only have two holes per overflow, and one of them is dedicated for the return line back to the tank, so only three holes to play with getting water in to the sump. I might be able to re-jig the return line and run it up the side of the tank in the joist space in the wall, but I'm not confident I can do that with the amount of access I have in there now.

And I'm not really thrilled with the idea of just separating the pipes to have two separate dursos, as it is now it works just fine for what I need it for, the problem is the mice-bubbles durso's produce. The water in my sump travels in a giant U, it enters and exits the sump on the same side. I didn't realize when I designed it that for a small amount of the water (and thus bubbles), they're able to "turn the corner" between the entrance and exit really tightly which doesn't give the micro-bubbles enough time to float to the surface. Hence the filter socks that I have to change every 24 hours.

I also don't think I'd be OK with going back to a Herbie - in principal they work fine, but I've got a super sized auto-top off pump to bring water all the way up from my basement, and a smaller-than-it-should-be return chamber, so the water level in the return chamber fluctuates a little bit on it's own anyway. My experience with the Herbies if they're not tuned properly is that can lead to a gradual over-filling of the display tank.

I hadn't really thought about the amount of build up that would happen in the trickle only overflow.... hmmmmm. Oh for the power of foresight! Changing the plumbing on this beast is not going to be a small job, perhaps I'll just live with what I've got if the general consensus is that an bean-animal style would be sub-optimal in this arrangement.