Thieling rollermat Red Sea s650
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Christopher Presley
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Year old I know, any update to this? Thinking about getting one for my 650.
Rick's Reef
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I have a roller mat on a new build. I guess I could say I am happy with it, but my tank is empty :). I am just running it plumbed.
My roller mat is plumbed in under a 5' wide stand with a Trigger 36 sump. To plumb it into my system, I drilled a 1-1/4" into the Trigger overflow chamber. There is a Cepex ball valve to allow me to remove the mat from the system for cleaning or maintenance but I expect to do this rarely! Here you can see the open space in the stand and the plumb line into the sump:
Here is what it looks like with the roller mat installed:
The drain in the middle of the wheel feeds into that 1-1/4" ball valve you can see in the first picture. I used (2) 45-degree elbows to shift the chamber closer to the sump because of my space constraints. The lower pipe is the input to the roller mat. You can just barely make out a Neptune flow monitor that goes to a 90 degree elbow up to a gate valve followed by a Tee and another gate valve.
This setup allows me to measure the flow through the mat, since my total tank flow may be higher than the mat can handle. The 2 ball valves likewise allow me to tune the main drain of my Bean Animal setup while balance the flow that bypasses the mat directly into the sump vs going through the RM. Right now I am only running about 350gph through the mat and 420gph total through the tank, so I subtract out to find what is bypassing.
Here is another view of the mat from an angle with the system empty. Here you can better see the plumbing out of the mat as well as the gate valves to control the flow:
It is kind of hard to see in the photo but the 3/4" line that looks like it is bisecting the left gate valve actually has (2) 90 degree bends to run behind and you can see the little blue pipe running horizontal to a street elbow that dumps into the middle drain into the Trigger sump. This is the overflow from the Theiling in case it overfills.
And lastly here is the system running:
Overall, again though this is a new build running on an empty tank, I am so far happy with the promise of the setup. Everything is perfectly silent and stable.
A few tips though...I bought mine from BulkReefSupply and they included the adapters to switch from metric to US pipe sizes. However, I was NOT happy with the overflow drain at all. I ran some tests in the garage before putting the Theiling in place and plugged the output to cause an overflow and because of the metric to US sizing differences, the adapter that came from BRS was only 1/2". So I picked up one of these:
and widened the hole so that I could just insert a standard 3/4" bulkhead. I have to say, taking that drill bit to a several hundred dollar imported piece of plastic made me nervous, but it worked flawlessly. I highly recommend opening up the plumbing to accommodate the higher flow in case something gets plugged up.
As an additional point of safety, I thought about wiring in an Apex input to the solenoid that triggers the roller mat turning to record how often the RM runs as well as to add a safety rule that if it runs for more than 30 seconds to throw an alarm (this would be an overflow condition as well). But I have not done it yet...maybe some day.
Best of luck!
Rick
My roller mat is plumbed in under a 5' wide stand with a Trigger 36 sump. To plumb it into my system, I drilled a 1-1/4" into the Trigger overflow chamber. There is a Cepex ball valve to allow me to remove the mat from the system for cleaning or maintenance but I expect to do this rarely! Here you can see the open space in the stand and the plumb line into the sump:
Here is what it looks like with the roller mat installed:
The drain in the middle of the wheel feeds into that 1-1/4" ball valve you can see in the first picture. I used (2) 45-degree elbows to shift the chamber closer to the sump because of my space constraints. The lower pipe is the input to the roller mat. You can just barely make out a Neptune flow monitor that goes to a 90 degree elbow up to a gate valve followed by a Tee and another gate valve.
This setup allows me to measure the flow through the mat, since my total tank flow may be higher than the mat can handle. The 2 ball valves likewise allow me to tune the main drain of my Bean Animal setup while balance the flow that bypasses the mat directly into the sump vs going through the RM. Right now I am only running about 350gph through the mat and 420gph total through the tank, so I subtract out to find what is bypassing.
Here is another view of the mat from an angle with the system empty. Here you can better see the plumbing out of the mat as well as the gate valves to control the flow:
It is kind of hard to see in the photo but the 3/4" line that looks like it is bisecting the left gate valve actually has (2) 90 degree bends to run behind and you can see the little blue pipe running horizontal to a street elbow that dumps into the middle drain into the Trigger sump. This is the overflow from the Theiling in case it overfills.
And lastly here is the system running:
Overall, again though this is a new build running on an empty tank, I am so far happy with the promise of the setup. Everything is perfectly silent and stable.
A few tips though...I bought mine from BulkReefSupply and they included the adapters to switch from metric to US pipe sizes. However, I was NOT happy with the overflow drain at all. I ran some tests in the garage before putting the Theiling in place and plugged the output to cause an overflow and because of the metric to US sizing differences, the adapter that came from BRS was only 1/2". So I picked up one of these:
and widened the hole so that I could just insert a standard 3/4" bulkhead. I have to say, taking that drill bit to a several hundred dollar imported piece of plastic made me nervous, but it worked flawlessly. I highly recommend opening up the plumbing to accommodate the higher flow in case something gets plugged up.
As an additional point of safety, I thought about wiring in an Apex input to the solenoid that triggers the roller mat turning to record how often the RM runs as well as to add a safety rule that if it runs for more than 30 seconds to throw an alarm (this would be an overflow condition as well). But I have not done it yet...maybe some day.
Best of luck!
Rick
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