return pump and overflow box

Filter socks are for tinkerers' ;D Folks who like to mess with stuff every few days. I've not ever ran a sock on my 55 with 30 sump for a year and a half, and the water's clear as glass and full of life. If you like you can put a reactor on that bypass line back to the fuge. That'd make good use of your unused energy. All in all, it sounds like you have a good handle on everything. You'll like the bigger OFlow box. One less worry is always a good thing.

 

Then you need a pump that can be turned down current wise. Restricting flow through the pump isn't going to make the coil suck less energy.

So, a Berlin setup is for tinkerers?

 

No, you just need to turn down flow. Moving water is not free. More flow = more current = more power = more heat. Work is not free.

 

Unless you have an pump that you can turn the voltage on motor down like the Tunze Silence it's going to run the same. You are just restricting the flow increasing the effective head height. The size of the coil in the motor determines the draw.

 

When you throttle the pump back it uses less energy. Ive read this on numerous occasions from different sources. This can be shown using a kill a watt meter.

 

+1 exactly.

One needs to realize that there are different types of motors for different applications. If one is referring to a motor for a well pump, air compressor, etc., then yes, they are wound and timed to overcome resistance and will draw more energy and create more heat in doing so. OTOH, the motors in our pumps are designed to be passive for the purpose of throttling. That's why they readily lose volume with such a small head height.

 

There are a lot of different types of AC and DC motors. However, this has more to do with simple physics than us having different pumps. Work is force over a distance. Moving water is work. Power is the rate at which that work is done. It is no different for pumps than fans or compressors or any device. The motor is just the driver, what it is what uses power.

So a pump can get to a certain pressure, but then nothing is happening. A pumps "cut off" head is the tallest column of water it can support.... but then no water is moving. No different that closing a valve. Opening that valve will cause water to flow from high to low pressure. Now water, that has a weight, is moving which has energy, over a distance and now work is being preformed.

How fast that happens is the power that the pump is using expressed in watts... voltage X current... voltage remains the same, current increases, watts increase, more work is performed, heat is produced.

Throttling a pump is absolutely no different then having more hight to pump up, or adding more 90s. It's just resistance, expressed as feet of head. The pump could care less. It does nothing to hurt the pump. Now throttling a pumps suction is a different story, and leaving a pump dead headed for a long period of time is also not good because it will overheat... but throttling is perfectly acceptable.

 

I am aware the QO is plenty for my setup but by increasing my flow will push the water through the filter sock faster to decrease the debris I have. I have a fully stocked mixed reef tank. I dont think it can hurt anything, can it? I just bought a pf 800 gph and a ehiem 900 gph pump for a good price. The 900 gph ehiem at 4 ft is about 700gph so Im thinking it will be ok for the pf 800 if not I will just use the QO.