aaron

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My durso overflow seems to be sucking down a lot of air and is filling my sump and susequently my main tank with micro bubbles. I have tried to adjust the valve on top of the durso but the setting that makes it quiet also seems to produce the most bubbles. Its driving me nuts and i cant work out what to do.
Any suggestions out there?
 

kimoyo

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aaron - because of how the durso's work you will always have bubbles coming into the sump.

If you have two drains you can setup a siphon, no air, with a backup drain.

If you don't have two drains you can deal with the bubbles in the sump. Some deal with it with baffles, or plumbing (allowing as much air as possible to escape before it hits the sump, or both.

If you can post some pictures and a description of your setup we can probably help you decide what to do.
 

aaron

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I have a sock over the outflow pipe,
I am running about 800 GPH through a single 1" durso,
Outflow pipe sits about an inch or so below the water level
I'll try an get a shot of the plumbing buts its a pretty simple setup.
 

aaron

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No, its a home made overflow. water exits through a hole in the back of the tank. Here's a quick schematic of it
 

Attachments

  • OVERFLOW.jpg
    OVERFLOW.jpg
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kimoyo

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Ok,

I talked about how to eliminate bubbles here. The goal there was to eliminate them before they went into the skimmer but its the same principles except your just dumping directly into the sump. The fine bubbles are very hard to get rid off.

It also depends on the dimensions of the sump and how long the bubbles have to rise before going to the pump. But before you do any changes to the sump, you could try the plumbing because it won't cost you much and is easy to do. Don't worry about gluing it (as long as its over the sump) until you get everything set.

Let me know what questions you have.
 
Last edited:

aaron

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I have been loking in my sump and i'm not certain that all the bubbles are coming from the overflow. I have lockline as the last parts of my return line and was wondering if the air might be getting sucked into the return through the joins in the locline? anyone ever heard of this?
I am going to try and seal them with tape temporarily and see if this improves it
 

kimoyo

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zahner said:
Paul, do you have a picture of the tee/gate valve in your drain?
Here you go. I took this a few minutes ago.


Click to enlarge

Im still working on everything but I have socks on the outputs. I have one on the skimmer output because i want to see how much stuff the skimmer doesn't catch. And I have another over the vent to catch anything that doesn't go into the skimmer. Only a trickle of water comes out of the vent, but its pointed down towards the sump in case of surges and so the air is not released very close to the bottom of the wood the tank sits on.
 

kimoyo

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House of Laughter said:
It is really tough to tell from those pics - are there any baffles in the sump? in relation to the skimmer? and in relation to the exit?

House
Nope, no baffles. The exit is behind the skimmer to the left about 12". I don't even need the socks for bubble control. When I didn't have the socks on I put an elbow on the skimmer exit pipe to point the output towards the right side, which you see in the pics. I'm running only about 200gph from the tank to the sump but also have circulation within the sump. The sump is a 30gal, I forgot the exact dimensions, but the footprint is probably 36" by 12".

Having the vent helps alot. The faster the water, the bigger (or multiple ones) tee you should have. You want to open the piping up (start of larger tee) to slow the water down, give the air a chance to rise (middle part of tee pointing up), and then force the water back into a smaller pipe (end of tee) hopefully pushing as much air out of the water as possible.
 

aaron

Australian
Location
Sydney
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Taping the lockline doesnt seem to help so now i am thinking a need to reduce the flow through my sump, currently its pretty fast at around 700 gph, in a 36 gal tank thinking of knocking it back to 500 and seeing if that helps.
 

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