Dream Home & Dream Tank Build
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Started reading this thread from the beginning. We so need to talk. Take a look at my build thread. If you and your wife are up for a trip to AZ, I have a casita. Come and stay for a weekend. Seriously if you want to see what you are thinking about, I've done it. In the pictures below, my main tank (250 gallon) is 45' from my fish room. The 130 gallon is 25' from the fish room. My build thread is new, but the system has been up and running since October 2018.
Standing at the door to the fish room. The infloor concrete sump is bottom right under the eggcrate and PVC pipe.
Straight back view from the door to the fish room.
105 gallon SW storage. I have the same size storage container for my RO/DI water.
I put my RO/DI system up high and out of the way. My plumber even ran the cold water hookup for it high on the wall. The waste water goes out through a PVC pipe through the house wall to the outside to water my trees.
The 250 gallon is off in the distance. I still need to get the cabinet and canopy finished for it.
You can see the 130 gallon better in this picture.
Standing at the door to the fish room. The infloor concrete sump is bottom right under the eggcrate and PVC pipe.
Straight back view from the door to the fish room.
105 gallon SW storage. I have the same size storage container for my RO/DI water.
I put my RO/DI system up high and out of the way. My plumber even ran the cold water hookup for it high on the wall. The waste water goes out through a PVC pipe through the house wall to the outside to water my trees.
The 250 gallon is off in the distance. I still need to get the cabinet and canopy finished for it.
You can see the 130 gallon better in this picture.
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mfraembs
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That is awesome! Thanks for all the information, I may have to take you up on the offer next time my wife and I are in AZ! Would love to see what you did in person. I didn't even think of recessing the sump into the foundation, what was the main purpose on doing this? I was thinking if the overflow on the display at about 4 1/2 feet wouldn't have any problems draining into the sump if it was mounted at about 2' in the fish room. Does the distance to the sump plus 90's in hard plumbing factor into this???Started reading this thread from the beginning. We so need to talk. Take a look at my build thread. If you and your wife are up for a trip to AZ, I have a casita. Come and stay for a weekend. Seriously if you want to see what you are thinking about, I've done it. In the pictures below, my main tank (250 gallon) is 45' from my fish room. The 130 gallon is 25' from the fish room. My build thread is new, but the system has been up and running since October 2018.
Standing at the door to the fish room. The infloor concrete sump is bottom right under the eggcrate and PVC pipe.
Straight back view from the door to the fish room.
105 gallon SW storage. I have the same size storage container for my RO/DI water.
I put my RO/DI system up high and out of the way. My plumber even ran the cold water hookup for it high on the wall. The waste water goes out through a PVC pipe through the house wall to the outside to water my trees.
The 250 gallon is off in the distance. I still need to get the cabinet and canopy finished for it.
You can see the 130 gallon better in this picture.
How do you keep chemicals and dirty water from entering the sump when you clean the floors in the fish room? It looks like you have a slight slope in the concrete diverting the water away from the sump but can't tell for certain.
On your saltwater reservoir do you have the RODI tank in the garage? Im sure that saved you a good amount of real estate in the fish room. Do you have pluming in the walls to fill the saltwater reservoir when you make a new batch?
I will shoot you over my floor plan once I have it wrapped up this week so you can see what I am looking at. Thanks for all the great info!
My suggestion, plan a trip before you build your home. If I had the opportunity to see someone else's setup before I did mine, I would have made some changes.
Where to begin on this one. There are a number of factors. First of all a bean style overflow assumes you are going from the tank to the sump in a fairly straight line and most likely with the sump under the tank. A 2.5 foot difference doesn't sound all that bad, right? Well think about the path of the water. You are going down 4.5 feet from the back of the tank to the top of the slab. Now depending on the longest length of drain hoses, in my case 45' and using a typical plumbing drain drop of 1/4"/foot, I am now 11.25 inches below the surface of the slab. To make the math easier, let's assume 12". Now your 2.5 difference is 1.5 feet. Also think about how a 3 drain bean animal works. During normal operation you have a siphon drain, a trickle overflow and an emergency drain. Water is flowing or being sucked through the siphon drain, that's the beauty of the bean animal design. The next drain there is a trickle of water and the emergency is high and dry. Perfect. Now let's look at what happens after a power fail or when you turn your pump(s) off and on. When the pumps come back on there is actually too much water flowing to your tank. Why is this? That siphon drain when it is sucking water through it it can pull water faster through it vs water just flowing down the drain. So now at startup the siphon drain, trickle and emergency drains all have water flowing through them. Whenever I watch my startup on my 250 gallon, I think to myself it's going to overflow, I have around 3,000gph flowing, but then the miracle happens and the siphon kicks in and starts sucking that water through it. But it is a lifetime, well maybe 30 seconds of shear panic. So now the siphon kicks in and the 3 drains go back to what they do during normal operation. So now what just happened. We had 3 drains with water flowing through them. The water in the siphon drain is fine. The trickle drain and emergency do you think they are fine? Where is all that water that was flowing through them. Did those lines drain? Think about it. Draw a level line from the 2' high sump level to your tank. In my case that would be around 45'. So now I have 2 - 2" drain lines each holding about 8 gallons of water. Water that is just sitting there. Yeah the trickle drain is doing just that and a trickle is coming out the other side. The emergency drain is another story. It's 8 gallons of water just sitting there. What if that that water sits for a month or two and then you get a power fail. Where is that funky water going to go when the power turns back on? Right back into your sump and tank. Not sure about you but I wouldn't want 8 gallons plus the trickle drain water being flushed back into my system. Plus I have 2 tanks plumbed into my sump pit. So the amount of stagnate funky water would be higher. In addition, I'm not sure how the water siphon process would even work with the water having to go down then back up, etc with a sump on or above the floor.
So I thought the one way to keep this from happening is to have the water flow into a pit that is lower than the drain lines. After the startup process, the trickle and emergency drains would empty and no funky water to poison the system. So I proposed the idea to my builder and his answer was "Cool, let's do it". We had the guy who was creating all the forms for the footers dig a hole for the sump pit and box it in. The concrete guys did the rest.
Now as for the sump pit, it works. The water drains into it as expected. But it is a pita when it comes to using it for any equipment like skimmers, filter socks, etc. Ideally you would want a floor mounted sump sitting next to the infloor concrete sump. By doing this, you would have the system drain into the infloor sump, but then have a pump or pumps, pump the water into your floor mounted sump for your filter material, skimmer, etc. I would then pump the water back to the aquariums from the floor mounted sump. It's a bit more complicated and you would need more floor space in the fish room. I didn't think about this so I don't have the floor space to do this. I do have a couple of 40 breeders stacked next to my infloor sump, but my return pumps are in the concrete sump.
The infloor concrete sump has a 6" wall around it. We accomplished this my lowering the floor in the fish room 6". So the height of the wall around it is the same height as the slab in the rest of the house. I did install a sink style drain in the floor of the fish room and I had the floor coated with the same epoxy material as my garage floor. The epoxy material we used is salt safe and non slip when wet.
I didn't use any hard piping. All of my drains and returns are high flex PVC. We did sleeve the high flex PVC into the black drain type plastic. We did that to protect the high flex PVC during construction. So I don't have any elbows on my drains. So everything under the floor and coming up is one continuous hose. I used 2" drains on the 250 gallon. The 130 gallon has 1.5" drains. All returns for both tanks are 1.5" hoses.
My fish room is 8' x 10'. Originally the room was suppose to be a mechanical room for HVAC and hot water heaters. The HVAC guy decided to put the HVAC units elsewhere in the house and the tankless hot water heaters. So there were these two indents or cavities that are about 24"x24" that are in the wall with the casita. Those openings can hold the Norwesco 105 gallon storage containers perfectly. So both my RO/DI and SW storage are in the fish room, but they don't use up any floor space. I will have to find my drawings for the fish room. I should have run the plumbing in the walls but I didn't so it sits along the wall.
Remember those tankless hot water heaters I mentioned. Check out my heating thread here on R2R. Forget using those electric heaters.
Tankless Hot Water Heating
So, I have setup that includes a 250 gallon aquarium, a 130 gallon aquarium, 150 gallon sump and 2 - 40 breeder aquariums all connected together. In total about 600 gallons of water. I had been heating my setup with 2 - 500W Titanium heaters from Finnex. I live in AZ so my heating need isn't...
www.reef2reef.com
I'd be happy to take a look at your plans. My wife and myself we have had 4 houses built in our lifetime. The house we are in now was our own design. I was the GC on the basement (2500 sq ft) on our place we had in CO. We also did a home addition and garage on another place.
The offer still stands, come take a look before you get too far along on your design. There are a number of things I would have done differently. What I have works, but it's not perfect.
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mfraembs
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So I have some exciting news, I decided to go all in with my glass box and went with Reef Savvy for my display tank. Im excited to get the design process with Felix and seems like his build time will fall right in line with my home build. I am considering making some changes to the tank location now. After all the information from KenO I think I may move the tank against one of the living room walls so I don't have to deal with all the underground plumbing and in slab sump. More details to come soon!
Below is the picture of my wife dropping of the deposit check! ;Nailbiting
Below is the picture of my wife dropping of the deposit check! ;Nailbiting
What? Wait no. You want to do the underfloor piping. Having a fish room is really what you want. Now is the time to do it.So I have some exciting news, I decided to go all in with my glass box and went with Reef Savvy for my display tank. Im excited to get the design process with Felix and seems like his build time will fall right in line with my home build. I am considering making some changes to the tank location now. After all the information from KenO I think I may move the tank against one of the living room walls so I don't have to deal with all the underground plumbing and in slab sump. More details to come soon!
Below is the picture of my wife dropping of the deposit check! ;Nailbiting
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mfraembs
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hahahah, still planing to do the fish room for sure but have the tank against the wall of the fish room rather than the middle of the living space. I have to say I am a bit intimidated with the in-floor sump plus I would prefer to have the sump elevated a bit to make it a bit easier to work in.
I think I found a pretty good area to install this tank and changing my floor plan to accommodate. I am still considering of having the tank in the middle of the room but my gut is telling me simpler is better!
Just my opinion, but I think you’re making the right decision. Still a lot of planning you can do to customize the house to the tank, but it makes things a lot easier not to have a tank in the center of the room.
It sounds like you have some confusion, the word "sump" isn't your traditional definition of what we as hobbyist call a sump.
It's not full of baffles and equipment, the only maintenance would be to clean detritus from the bottom.
It's inevitable that you have to have a sump below grade in order to guarantee gravity to do its job. Other wise you'll have to prime your drains every time you cycle the return pumps.
All Ken has in his below grade sump is return pumps. Above and next to it he has a hobby style sump that houses all the traditional equipment you find in a normal sump that is fed by a return pump in the below grade sump.
It's not as complicated as it sounds, which is probably why he offered to put you up in his guest house to wrap your mind around it. There's just a different set of concerns and needs if you plan to build your house around your tank.
My original plan was to have the tank as a 360. We kept going back and forth on the position in the room. In the end the position didn’t work for flow in the room. I wish I could have made that work. Having a full 360 view on a large tank would have been amazing. At the time changing the room size didn’t work because we were too far along in our design. If I had started earlier in the design I would have done it with no regrets. My 250 and 130 which are both plumbed under the floor are dead silent. My 250 has over 3,000 gph flow to the sump. My 130 has over 2,000 gph. So with the combination of the 2 the flow in my infloor sump is awesome. Detritus doesn’t get a chance to settle out.
I actually think that if you’re going for a 360 open viewing of the tank with a center overflow, that’s awesome. But if @mfraembs is going to have an external overflow on one side, that basically ruins the view from one panel and it actually becomes an eyesore, IMO (unless you have a minimalist overflow like an elos). Might as well turn it into a peninsula. Don’t have anything against 360 tanks per se.
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i'm still following this guys 
If you haven’t watched the plumbing video for Ryan’s (BRS) home tank it’s worth a watch. Clean lines. His method for hiding power cords seems good also. Since your fish room will be right behind the tank it could give you some good ideas.
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mfraembs
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@KenO was wondering if by chance your still active on R2R. We are finally are in the finishing stages of building our home and I am starting to work on my fish room build-out!!!! You will be excited to hear that I went forward with the in-floor sump. I have some questions if your still around here.
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mfraembs
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Awesome! Was wondering what type of return pump you are running and how you like it??? I am estimating I have about 18’ of head pressure.
also I assume you have a smaller pump in the concrete pit to feed your equipment sump? Do you dump the filtered water back into the concrete pit to the return pump or utilize an external return pump that sends the filtered water directly back to the display???
I'm a fan of the jabeo pumps. I'm using the dcp-20000. I estimated my head loss at around 15'. The pumps have no problem pushing the water. I use 2 pumpe
Your other question will require a longer explanation. Right now I am using 2 - 40 breeders stacked. They sit next to the concrete pit. The upper 40 holds my roller mat, skimmer, ats and ozone. The 40 breeder is drilled and is using a Fiji cube overflow. The main drain feeds the lower 40 breeder. The secondary and emergency drains to straight into the pit. The lower 40 breeder also utilizes a bean overflow. I bought that tank already predrilled. The drains go straight into the pit. It works, but I'm in the process of simplifying. I purchased a trigger platinum 39 to replace both 40 breeders. The trigger sump has a built in roller mat. I wanted to get a higher flow through the roller mat and I'm at the max for my current ClariSea RM. I'm going to place the trigger sump at the same height as where the upper 40 breeder is at. I like the height for access to the skimmer and the other equipment. I'm going to have to figure out how to drill the trigger sump so that the water flows back to the pit using a bean style drain system.
My other issue I was addressing is getting equipment off the floor. I'm using a kalk stirrer and a CAL Rx. Since the trigger sump will replace both 40 breeders, the space under the trigger sump will be used to move that equipment off the floor.
I can shoot a video which will give you a better idea of what I described above.
Your other question will require a longer explanation. Right now I am using 2 - 40 breeders stacked. They sit next to the concrete pit. The upper 40 holds my roller mat, skimmer, ats and ozone. The 40 breeder is drilled and is using a Fiji cube overflow. The main drain feeds the lower 40 breeder. The secondary and emergency drains to straight into the pit. The lower 40 breeder also utilizes a bean overflow. I bought that tank already predrilled. The drains go straight into the pit. It works, but I'm in the process of simplifying. I purchased a trigger platinum 39 to replace both 40 breeders. The trigger sump has a built in roller mat. I wanted to get a higher flow through the roller mat and I'm at the max for my current ClariSea RM. I'm going to place the trigger sump at the same height as where the upper 40 breeder is at. I like the height for access to the skimmer and the other equipment. I'm going to have to figure out how to drill the trigger sump so that the water flows back to the pit using a bean style drain system.
My other issue I was addressing is getting equipment off the floor. I'm using a kalk stirrer and a CAL Rx. Since the trigger sump will replace both 40 breeders, the space under the trigger sump will be used to move that equipment off the floor.
I can shoot a video which will give you a better idea of what I described above.
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