Plumbing long distances - tips for quiet flow?

NeveSSL

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Hi everyone,

Have a tank that is going to be plumbed into a sump under the floor and across the room. Or it may have to go into the garage. TBD. Either way, any tips on plumbing longer distances and still have the drains be quiet? Right now my plan is to use a Herbie with both going individually to the sump and placing a gatevalve on the main drain. Should it be at the sump? I'm also planning on going up at least to 1.25" drains because of the pipe resistance over that length.

Anything else I should consider?

Brandon
 

ShakeyGizzard

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how big is your sump ? that can be a lot of water than goes into your sump when the return is turned off. But I believe basically the set up you have can be tuned with the gate valve to be quiet. The placement of the gate valve may not matter except for the ease of adjustment. I would insulate the pipes for better temp stability.
 
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NeveSSL

NeveSSL

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Sump is 70g. That is going to require some trial and error, I suspect. Planning on siphon breaks and may also use check valves.

Brandon
 

Troylee

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Sump is 70g. That is going to require some trial and error, I suspect. Planning on siphon breaks and may also use check valves.

Brandon
Don’t plan on the check valves doing much! It’s not if, but when! They always fail…
 

Red_Beard

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place the gate valve at the sump. Air in the pipes is what is going to cause the noise, if you place the gate valve at the sump, the whole line can be full of water with no air. That configuration is going to be what runs you silent, for the main drain. How you plumb the other line and how much it flows will determine how loud it is. if you have a couple 90s that take the water flow from being water low with an air channel above to intermittently filling the whole pipe with water and then glurping air at the 90, you are introducing noise. so if you need 90s, make sure your secondary has very little flow, otherwise use 45's. hopefully i explained that understandably... sometimes things make sense in my head but doesn't get conveyed properly.
 

Dburr1014

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Hi everyone,

Have a tank that is going to be plumbed into a sump under the floor and across the room. Or it may have to go into the garage. TBD. Either way, any tips on plumbing longer distances and still have the drains be quiet? Right now my plan is to use a Herbie with both going individually to the sump and placing a gatevalve on the main drain. Should it be at the sump? I'm also planning on going up at least to 1.25" drains because of the pipe resistance over that length.

Anything else I should consider?

Brandon
Definitely gate at the sump. It's easy to tune also, you can just close your gate slowly until you see bubbles slowdown out of the secondary at your sump.
Both pipes should be slightly submerged when in normal operation.

Also, use Unions so you can take the pipe apart easily to clean. At a low pitch there might be more buildup of crap in the pipe.
 

Stevorino

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I had a similar setup in my old house.... Fish room was a floor below in the basement and ~35 feet away horizontally.

First thing to note is that you are gonna have some noisy return pump(s) to get the water back up there at a decent rate. I had a pair of Iwaki 100RLTs doing the job and they were great, but loud. I had them on vibration pads, which helped a bit.

You'll have to make sure that when your returns are off your sump has enough capacity to hold all of the water from the lines and whatever it suctions from the tank. I am not a believer in check valves after having one give me problems.

Water moving through the pipes was never noisy for me, nor was the overflow. I am a fan of Bean Animal-style overflows, potentially with multiple suction drains if your sump can handle the flow.

Figure out your bottleneck before finalizing all the plans. In my setup the sump roller mats are the bottleneck.

Happy to answer any other questions you have - I ran the setup above in various iterations for ~6 years.
 

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