New plumbing fixed... in the noise department. Its a little crazy and dangerous so please read along and copy at your own risk. For a benchmark here is the duo durso setup. Now this is very similar to my current tank so I have no idea why the noise is 20X louder than at work. If I had this tank at work I would seriously tick a lot of people off and it would drive me insane just as fast. I tried altering the down spouts and amount of flow coming from the pump. This setup used slotted spouts to help release air bubbles and I had the pump dialed back to 60-70%.
Tons of noise and overall, unusable in my eyes. So a change needed to happen using what I already had. I decided to turn it into a Herbie with a few customizations. Due to both drains being at the same height and drawing water equally into the bulkhead I hard to start with the strainers. I needed one to draw from the bottom to be used for the siphon side and the other needed to have just the top open to take in the trickle.
The first attempt at using moldable plastics didn't go so well.
The next attempts used tape on the backside and very slowly filling one row at a time until it was completely filled and then reheating the entire bulkhead again in hot water to smooth it out as best as possible.
Siphon Side
Trickle Side
1" valve added to control siphon side. There were also some modifications done to the bulkheads as the enter the sump by making them super short like the ones used on my display tank. This allows for an air gap to happen on a slotted down spout and is easier to make adjustments.
While adding the valve I had to remember to put TWO union couplings on the tiny pipe that connects the valve to the sump unions. One for the union and one for the valve facing in opposite directions. When gluing the fittings together the I only put on ONE!! Shoooot! To fix this and reclaim my valve union I had to cut the pipe apart, put the fitting underneath a drill press with a 1" bit and drilled out the now crappy piece of pipe. It took a lot of clamps and fine adjustments to make sure I only removed the pipe and didn't compromise the fitting. Once it was cleaned up I redid this section with the union couplings back in place. I created some fancy easter basket plastic orange shredding in the process :D
Here is the Herbie setup installed and running. This video has not been muted as you will be able to hear my wife's cat a few times during the video and proves how quiet the setup now is. Any slight trickle will be muffled even more with the sock cover in place and the doors closed.
There is no emergency in this setup and I understand the risks. I will go the main safeguard I've impliemted already and others I could do in the future. The main is power failure. When the power goes out the water will drain until it hits the siphon drain holes. This causes the tube to be filled with air. When the power is restored this drain can not form a siphon fast enough to prevent the display tank from overflowing. To stop such events from occuring the Apex has a virtual switch created called
POWER_OUTAGE
Set OFF
If Power Apex Off 720 Then ON
The return pump has this code
RETURN_PUMP
Fallback OFF
Set ON
If Output POWER_OUTAGE = ON Then OFF
If FeedD 720 Then ON
What this does is when power is off nothing runs like usual. When power comes back on POWER_OUTAGE turns on and stays on for 12 hours. This causes the return pump outlet to also go OFF for 12 hours. In that time I have to manually restart the siphon or turn the pump outlet off manually from Apex Fusion until I can get into work. I will be alerted when the power goes off and comes back and have time to respond. The Feed D option allows me to restart the siphon within the 12 hour window after power failure and not have POWER_OUTAGE override my change for 12 hours.
A future tank upgrade might be to have an optical sensor at the rim of the tank that will decrease flow or shut off the pump if the water level rises too high during running operation. The trickle drain though has been tested to take on 10-15% more power above the quietest running level. As it climbs higher above the slats on the emergency it causes increased noise and will let me know if I need to make adjustments.
