Plumbing the drains on my 75gal

Alright I know I sometimes ask questions that may be redundant, but I still am not 100% confident I have all things considered in my design.

Im working with a 1" and a 1.5" bulkhead in the overflow chamber of a 75gal tank. I screwed up my plumbing the first time around when I started building this tank up a year ago. I used the 1.5" bulkhead for a drain, capped off the 1" drain and ran 1.5" of PVC to the intake chamber on the sump. I did not make use of unions, gate valves, etc. So I am ripping it out and doing it right this time.

Ive chosen to go with a herbie style setup in my overflow chamber and will be utilizing the 1.5" and 1" drains.

I need opinions on how to go about setting this up. My initial design ive drawn up (will post pic as soon as I can) has the 1.5" drain being reduced to 1". From there I have both drains, now 1", connecting to individual tee fittings, and the piping the tee fittings are connected to go to the intake chamber on the left and the fuge on the right. Right after the Tee fitting on either side is a gate valve to control flow to each side.

Should I instead go with the 1.5" plumbing all the way through and just upsize the 1" to 1.5" with a fitting? I dont know that I need 1.5" drain as I cannot seem to find anything online to calculate the GPH (still researching the math on this).

I will have unions in place to be able to take the thing apart and clean it out if ever necessary.

Im not sure either if having a gate valve is necessary to the fuge. I might just go with a ball-valve.

All valves and plumbing will be schedule 80 from BRS. I appreciate everyones help on this. I dont want to have to rip and replace this PVC again.

Im also not quite confident on the drain itself into the intake chamber and the fuge. I think I might put a tee fitting on the end of the pipe going into the fuge and put caps on either end and drill holes in it to be able to angle the flow back upward. On the intake chamber side I had intended to just let it be the 1" pipe going straight down into it as far on the left side as I can get it.

 

For a simple 75gal tank you are working with a lot of over kill for flow to sump how much noise and flow do you want ? a single 1" set up properley will be all you need a 1.5 will be so empty and starving for water it will sound like a second floor toilet when its flused that was roughed in with plastic pipe and not cast iron . .

 

thats what i figured. i picked up the plumbing necessary today to reduce it from 1.5 to 1" and will be redoing my plumbing layout this weekend.

 

For what its worth this I think is a good idea ..

 

I'm a little confused about this, especially the last paragraph, why are you teeing off each drain? A herbie drain only has one drain actually being used and the other is just a backup so you can fine tune your flow or in case of blockage in the main drain.

Maybe the pictures will clarify everything. I personally wouldn't mind going with a 1.5" main drain since you're going to be restricting the flow on that anyway then just use the 1" as the emergency. The only downside is that you need two sizes of plumbing which can be a hassle to deal with in which case I understand reducing to 1" for everything.

Are you talking about teeing off both the emergency and the main drain so the main drain provides flow to the fuge and to the skimmer section and if that blocks up then the fuge still gets water and water keeps going to the skimmer section of the sump?

FWIW I like putting a union right on the outside of the bulkhead, or at least having a bulkhead with a threaded fitting on the outside of the tank so you can easily remove all plumbing for cleaning/maintenance/redoing/emergency purposes. I also support having a union where ever you have a long run of pipe that might be a hassle to remove for cleaning/maintenance.

 

yes, thats exactly what i meant. effectively both drains would be dumping to the same final plumbing that feeds both the fuge and the skimmer section. one would simply have a taller standpipe in the overflow box to become a backup. my only confusion is what that air from the backup pipe will do and what kind of noise it will cause.

drawing a picture now. ill have it posted in a moment

 

this should help clarify things

 

The picture does help greatly. The problem I see with it is that the gate valves are the most likely place for an obstruction to form or get caught because that's where the pipe is restricted. This doesn't provide adequate redundancy for my taste because you have restrictions on both outlets, your emergency drain is restricted as well. If one gate valve gets plugged up the other side is already restricted so it won't handle any more flow and you'll still have a flood which negates the reasoning behind the herbie method.

I think if I were to do it, I would not plumb the emergency drain into anything, just have that flow straight to the sump. I wouldn't worry about the fuge not getting water flow if the main drain gets plugged up. I don't want my emergency drain to be restricted at all, I want it to be able to easily handle as much flow as possible for worst case scenarios IMO.

I imagine the fuge would be fine without new water for a quite a while, I would imagine a day at least, it will get some heat through the sump baffles and you could maybe run a small powerhead or something in there if you wanted to really be paranoid and be sure it still had water movement to keep gas exchange happening efficiently.

 

Also if your baffles in that picture are accurate in height to what you're planning I think you're going to get a lot of bubbles from your water flowing over the right side baffle. The right side is the fuge, correct?

I would lower that baffle to maybe .5" higher than the lowest baffle on the left, that should keep the water level of the fuge flowing over and down into the return chamber and not incorporating a bunch of air in a waterfall like I think you would have right now. Waterfalls are noisy and could send bubbles back through your return pump which is annoying, to me anyway.

You could also just put the fuge in the middle and simplify everything by not having to tee off anything. Although that might be way too much flow for the fuge depending on how large your return pump is, if it were me I would only have like 300-400gph flowing through the sump which would be fine for a fuge I think. Just another idea to consider.