My 75g is about a year old and I have dialed in everything except the return pump. I am on my 3rd return pump setup and am pulling my hair out a bit. My situation is that the tank isn't very large so I don't need a lot of flow (shooting for around 4x turnover on 95g of total volume) but I have the sump in the basement so there is a lot of head pressure necessitating a significantly oversized pump.
I started with a pair of Current-USA Eflux 6010s running together in the hopes of having redundancy in case of a failure. I quickly ran into issues with the flow varying quite significantly over time, making it impossible to dial in my gate valve. Individually each was only just able to overcome the head pressure and combined deliver around 300gph. I assumed given they were running so close to the margin that they were struggling to give consistent flow and / or fighting each other so I pulled the plug on those.
Next I bought a Jebao DCP-10000, thinking let's try one bigger pump. This one was able to shoulder the load and deliver 400ish gph just fine. However, similar to the Eflux, over time it would periodically have a step change in output and drop by 10%, give or take, for no apparent reason. Every time this happened my return would start sucking in air making noise / mess and I'd either have to tinker with the pump until it resumed normal output or adjust the gate valve (always having to adjust it again later when it resumed normal operation). It would happen every few days and was very annoying and made it impossible for me to confidently leave town for a couple of days.
So I finally decided that maybe I was cheaping out and bought a Vectra M-2, assuming that Ecotech was a gold standard in pumps and powerheads in our hobby. However, with this pump the controller is flaking about once a week where for no reason it just cuts power for a few seconds at a time, sometimes getting into a repeated pattern of it. Also the flow has also experienced some step changes similar to the Jebao.
So needless to say I'm pretty frustrated at this point as this is the one part of my setup that I haven't been able to dial in and rely on. I'm curious if people have had similar issues or any suggestions. Is it unrealistic for me to expect consistent output from a return pump? Is the head pressure the wild card (based on my output, I'm guessing I have about 15' effective)? Choice of pump? Should I get an L-2, something considerably overpowered and run it at a lower speed?
I started with a pair of Current-USA Eflux 6010s running together in the hopes of having redundancy in case of a failure. I quickly ran into issues with the flow varying quite significantly over time, making it impossible to dial in my gate valve. Individually each was only just able to overcome the head pressure and combined deliver around 300gph. I assumed given they were running so close to the margin that they were struggling to give consistent flow and / or fighting each other so I pulled the plug on those.
Next I bought a Jebao DCP-10000, thinking let's try one bigger pump. This one was able to shoulder the load and deliver 400ish gph just fine. However, similar to the Eflux, over time it would periodically have a step change in output and drop by 10%, give or take, for no apparent reason. Every time this happened my return would start sucking in air making noise / mess and I'd either have to tinker with the pump until it resumed normal output or adjust the gate valve (always having to adjust it again later when it resumed normal operation). It would happen every few days and was very annoying and made it impossible for me to confidently leave town for a couple of days.
So I finally decided that maybe I was cheaping out and bought a Vectra M-2, assuming that Ecotech was a gold standard in pumps and powerheads in our hobby. However, with this pump the controller is flaking about once a week where for no reason it just cuts power for a few seconds at a time, sometimes getting into a repeated pattern of it. Also the flow has also experienced some step changes similar to the Jebao.
So needless to say I'm pretty frustrated at this point as this is the one part of my setup that I haven't been able to dial in and rely on. I'm curious if people have had similar issues or any suggestions. Is it unrealistic for me to expect consistent output from a return pump? Is the head pressure the wild card (based on my output, I'm guessing I have about 15' effective)? Choice of pump? Should I get an L-2, something considerably overpowered and run it at a lower speed?