Alright most of the plumbing is done and dried so I filled the tank up this morning and gave it a test run and I am pretty happy with it. After a couple of minutes of adjusting the syphon I got it nice and quiet, just a slight hum from the return pump. I will finish it off and change a couple of little things but apart from that all the plumbing is done! Sorry about the dirty glass!
I have made two drains and a return in the weir. The return and syphon are 25mm and the backup is 40mm. I figured that if the 25mm syphon gets blocked then it would be better to have the larger pipe as the back up. I just need to add the strainers (on order) to the drains and I will shorten the 40mm drain by about 20mm or so. I put the comb on the inside of the weir and will make the water level about 20mm lower than the comb so the water can fall freely without having to go over any edges and make splashing sounds.
Here is how I have the return plumbed back in to the tank. I saw a lot of pictures and videos where people had cut some teeth out of the comb and had the return going through that. The problem I saw was that water would run along the underside of the pipe and trickle in to the water in the weir and make an annoying noise. This way there is no noise at all. I will probably change the elbow going in to the water to black pipe or some loc line if I can get hold of some.
Top view of the weir. You can see the cap with the hole on the backup drain that stops the slight amount of noise that it made. I could easily turn the backup in to an automatic syphon if the water level ever got too high for some reason. The back up can easily handle the flow with the syphon line closed off anyway.
Here you can see the water level is about halfway up the comb.
Now inside the cabinet... It is pretty tight where the bulkheads but it keeps it all tucked away in the corner. The clear vinyl is the return going back in to the tank. Instead of it going directly to the bulkhead, I will put a 90 degree elbow on the bulkhead and just have a straight bit of vinyl connecting from it to the main plumbing.
Here is the return section of the sump (this isnt the water height it will be running at). The pump is about 20mm off the bottom which makes a huge difference in the amount of vibration going through the stand. The pipe goes around the brace and tees off in to the rest of the plumbing. The tee on the left is just blocked for now but this will be going to the phosban reactor. I had to hang the plumbing to get rid of any vibrations going through the stand.
On to the skimmer section. The main syphon is just straight down in to the water. I kept the back up drain at 40mm the whole way to the sump just incase the syphon got blocked. There wasn't enough room to go straight down with the 40mm pipe so just added a couple of 90's. The pipe isn't glued after the valve as I will be using that for waterchanges. When the syphon is tuned properly, the backup doesn't produce any bubbles and is silent.
You can see here I still have plenty of flow left in the syphon if I ever need it. I put a sock on there for now cos there were a few spiders, snails etc living in the tank which I didn't want going through the pump!
This is the refugium section, I am still thinking of how to do the plumbing past the valve. Maybe a spray bar to randomise the flow in the refugium and make sure there are no dead spots. The valve on the top left will most likely go to a chiller at a later stage.
Normal water level with the tank running.
Power off.
I am pretty impressed with the little laguna pump. Even with all the bends and valves etc there is still a heap of water flowing back in to the tank.
