Sump design help

I am in the middle of a major design review at work.... why not do it here also??

I guess the big difference is that I get paid here in future advice from 3reefers and karma....

M

 

Thank you everyone for the comments.

They're acrylic tanks. at first we were considering using glass, but we decided to go with acrylic in the end for the same reasons you stated.

Yes, it came built in.

I don't think were going to have an ATO. I'm a little worried about evaporation too. The drawing isn't totally to scale though. These units are actually quite large so there should be a lot of surface area in the return chamber. It's also decently deep in there and the pumps will run in about 3" of water if need be.

I was thinking in the skimmer compartment so they will always be in water.

 

A thought to consider on ATO. Running a small business is really a system engineering problem. The system has several functions...1) tank maintenance, 2) advertising, 3) sales, 4) inventory, 5) cleaning, 6) employee procedures, 7) Payroll..... Every function has its own set of procedures and frequencies the they need execution.

Business success is most simply defined as the ability to CONSISTENTLY deliver higher quality and better value to your customers.

When you multiple the ATO issue by how many tanks? How much time will it take to deal with that issue?? How often will it be forgotten?

In my wife's martial arts school, it is now probably one of the most 'high tech" martial arts schools around as we have implemented automated procedures and functionality to improve consistency. All that effort has translated directly to the bottomline of profit.

A central ATO reservior feeding all the tanks would make the most sense to me. He is probably going to be selling RO/DI water anyway. Thus he'll need a huge reservior anyway. Instead of continually checking MANY tanks frequently and having the varying water parameters caused by evaporation and having to manually refill over and over again forever...it would seem much more profitable in the end to have an ATO tied to the RO/DI reservior that you'll be selling from. Never need to check levels, never need to fill individual tanks, never need to check separate reservior.

Employee time doing those tasks is time they are not helping customers or generating new business.

Something to consider.

Mark

 

We were actually just discussing ATO this morning. The system will have valves that you can simply open to add fresh water or salt water independently at each system. ATO would be very nice, but every time you bag a fish with tank water the ATO would replace that water with FW. Then we would have to watch salinity constantly. We figure if FW is topped off via the valve every morning and salt water is topped off ever evening at close, it should stay fairly close to stable. Of course it will have to be tested once a week to be sure.

The sumps are together. We used 1/4 lexan so it should be pretty bullet-proof. There were some strange braces in the sumps that I used to brace the baffles against. In-between baffles I glued some PVC braces. The brace system should hold all the water weight leaving the baffles only as a seal system.

 

I would suggest testing the salinity twice daily. Make it part of the opening/closing routine for the manager/owner. Afterall it literally takes 30 seconds with a refractometer and could have disaterous results if it were to fluctuate too much too fast.

 

A very good point.

 

Makes sense...

Question... do you have the valving built in to isolate portions of your system? I am thinking in terms of QT, something breaking, etc.

M

 

Yeah, you can shut off flow to any one tank. There is a large QT area in the back that consists of 12 40 gallon breeders also. They don't want to sell anything without QT'ing first and don't want to display anything that is sick.

 

Good... just trying to help. Quite an undertaking to set up a fish store.

M

 

Indeed it is. I don't think I could ever do it myself, but I'm happy to help coloradoreef with whatever he needs.