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Reef Guy11

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Hello Everyone,

How is everyone, I need to know how to Build a Surge Please. Anyone with a Diagram Would Help. I like how they work. I want to Build It for my 200 Gal. Tank. Thanks In Advance. :D
 

wombat1

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Reef Guy1,
If you do a search under "Carlson Surge Device" or "Borneman Surge Device" on www.metacrawler.com, or do a search on my past posts under "surge", you will find a wealth of info! There is a picture of my surge device in the link in my signature. Surges are the bomb! It's definitely worth the time spent building one.
 

Mogo

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Reefguy.
I will be building a similar surge device within a couple weeks myself from Bornemans book "Aquarium Corals" page 341. Maybe with some mod's as needed. Very good diagram. My only hangup is how big the reservoir and fill rate (surge frequency) should be versus the size of my 140 tank. Trial and error? Yikes...
 

wombat1

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Mogo,
My surges go once every minute or so. They're about 1-2 gallons each time in a 30 gallon tank. For a 140, you could probably make 2 5g buckets or one 10g tank as a surge. The frequency isn't really all that important, IMO. I've seen great coral growth in a tank that surges once every 10 minutes. The surge in that tank was amazing, though. It was about 10 feet higher than the tank, and about twice the water volume of the display. As long as you periodically wash all the polyps with a good blast of water, you should be OK.
HTH, Matt
 

prefect1

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I used to have a complete tutorial on my site, but I think the University I went to has since destroyed it!

I will see if I can get it up somewhere and point you to it.


Cheers.
 

Reef Guy11

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Hey Wombat,

Thanks For the info. I will check it out. Yes Surges are the Bomb. I have like them ever since i saw them at Tropical Paradise, in San Leandro. To Perfect, Thank's and hope you can get that info for me. I like to see different way on how to build them. :D
 

wombat1

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Those are the surges I was referring to! TP is a great store... Those are the Carlson type. The one with the toilet flapper is the Borneman type.
 

wombat1

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One thing I forgot to mention ....VERY IMPORTANT... Make sure your overflow can handle it before you leave for a couple minutes!

One "supposed" drawback is that you can't make an auto topoff in your sump, because of the changing water level. Normally the tank level stays constant, and your sump level varies with any input/output of water. With a surge, however, your tank and sump level both rise and fall in a cycle. The actual variance is about 1/2 inch in my 10 gallon sump. You put your auto topoff at the bottom of that cycle, and you're set! It would also be easy to make a closed loop with a surge so you wouldn't have any (or very little) water level change in your sump at all.
 

texasreefer

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We had Eric Borneman speak at our club meeting tonight about surge devices. It was a really good presentation and he demonstrated several different designs. The Borneman design is really simple to build and cheap. The main drawback to the design as well as the Carlson Surge is bubbles in the tank. You can vary the surge rate on the Borneman surge by changing the size of the pump. Eric recommends mounting the surge tank in another room if possible so it doesn't sound like someone is flushing a toilet every few minutes.
 

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