500g Reef Tank Build Saga: A Guide on What Not to Do

h2so4hurts · Aug 25, 2020

Hopefully on the path to recovery... The corals that survived are looking polypy as ever.

h2so4hurts · Sep 14, 2020

As it turns out it seems like my problems keep compounding themselves. The return pumps I chose for the system were two Ecotech Vectra L2's running out of the sump externally each fed by their own 2" bulkhead. It was working great, and I loved how silent they were and then two weeks ago I came home to the water level down an inch and the skimmer overflowing. One of the Vectra's straight up died after barely a year of use. After a short back and forth with ecotech, and a weekend, I got the pump replaced after about 2 weeks. Glad I kept my reeflo dart as a back up. I didn't want to really deal with the stress of this happening again so I got a Reeflo Hammerhead Gold from BRS last week and plumbed it all up Saturday morning. It's certainly not DC silent, but I can't hear it over all of the fans in the fish closet and my reeflo dart has been solid with minor maintenance for 5 years so hopefully this change gives me some peace of mind. It pumps quite a bit more than the two L2's which supposedly had a combined flow of 6200gph. There must be A LOT more head loss on those pumps because I had to dial back the 6000gph Hammerhead about 25% to match the same sump level as the Vortech L2's.

Externally plumbed L2's

Monster hammerhead doing its thing.

There's always at least one leak...luckily just from the unused bulkhead I plugged. Just needed a couple turns of the plug with some channel locks to get it sorted.

I should probably finish the main story one of these days?

Pntbll687 · Sep 14, 2020

h2so4hurts said:
As it turns out it seems like my problems keep compounding themselves. The return pumps I chose for the system were two Ecotech Vectra L2's running out of the sump externally each fed by their own 2" bulkhead. It was working great, and I loved how silent they were and then two weeks ago I came home to the water level down an inch and the skimmer overflowing. One of the Vectra's straight up died after barely a year of use. After a short back and forth with ecotech, and a weekend, I got the pump replaced after about 2 weeks. Glad I kept my reeflo dart as a back up. I didn't want to really deal with the stress of this happening again so I got a Reeflo Hammerhead Gold from BRS last week and plumbed it all up Saturday morning. It's certainly not DC silent, but I can't hear it over all of the fans in the fish closet and my reeflo dart has been solid with minor maintenance for 5 years so hopefully this change gives me some peace of mind. It pumps quite a bit more than the two L2's which supposedly had a combined flow of 6200gph. There must be A LOT more head loss on those pumps because I had to dial back the 6000gph Hammerhead about 25% to match the same sump level as the Vortech L2's.

Externally plumbed L2's

Monster hammerhead doing its thing.

There's always at least one leak...luckily just from the unused bulkhead I plugged. Just needed a couple turns of the plug with some channel locks to get it sorted.

I should probably finish the main story one of these days?

There is always a leak!! You got that right

Sucks about the ecotech pumps. I feel ya about failing equipment. I had a brand new ato fail and flood an all in one tank in my office. It was replaced quickly, but just sits on the shelf now