Overflows vs. Drilled Glass Pane
- Thread starter josho923
- Start date
choff
Non-member
Actually after looking at the video again, I think the only thing I would have done is simply use 1" pipe everywhere instead of 1.5" like bean did. I bet 3/4" would have been fine. It's incredible how much water this thing moves. I have my siphon line valve almost 3/4 closed. There really is no noise. None.
...stupid auto correct
...stupid auto correct
choff
Non-member
After running mine now for a few days this was happening to me too. Since I turn off my pumps when I feed this was a bigger concern for me so I figured out what my issue was.
What was happening to me was the full siphon line was not at full siphon and the water would rise until it plugged the air line in the durso converting that to a siphon. The water level would drop until the air line was exposed again, but the full siphon line still had air in it. The water would rise again and this process would just keep repeating and yoyo up and down.
What I figured out was I needed to raise the airline above the level of the 3rd back up line. It's when all 3 lines are pulling in water that the full siphon line will finally kick in. My issue is that puts the airline very close to the top of the tank line. I'm going to cut down my backup line height to give me a little more room for comfort.
That make sense? Hope it helps.
...stupid auto correct
I have a 220 DT (72x24x29) with a Bean setup. It has a 66x2x4 internal wier with 3) 2" holes feeding the external 18x4x8 box which has 2" drainage.
On initial setup, I had a hard time getting the siphon to start and this was rectified by making sure the drain portion of the sump has a contant water level and the two siphon drains are both submerged only about 1.5". I had previously had them extending more than 4" into the sump and I believe the depth prevented the air bubble from pushing itself out fully into the sump due to buoyancy, but that's onnly a guess. Since reducing the depth into the sump, it starts up 99% of the time without problem and I have autofeeders which feed twice daily while timers shut down and start the return pump back up. The system has been running this way since Nov of 2011 with no problems.
I run a filter sock over the end of the drain lines most of the time and have noticed that if I get lazy on changing them out, restarts become problematic due to the increased backpressure of the clogged sock.
I have thought quite a bit about the 1% of the time it doesn't start up properly, it will "flush" repeatedly since the primary drain can't purge the air, the water level in the external overflow rises until the air intake on the "open channel" drain becomes submerged and converts to "closed channel" and sucks the external box nearly dry until it loses suction. At this point, the siphon drain is lost and the external box begins refilling and the cycle repeats.
My thoughts on this are, why does the secondary drain purge air so efficiently and the primary does not? The answer I believe is the air line at the top allows an additional purge path for the air, preventing trapping and compressing the bubble in the top of the siphon piping. I have thought about tapping the primary drain and submerging the air line to the level of the primary siphon intake to see if that helps. But...I'm lazy. It restarts after a couple of tries.
On initial setup, I had a hard time getting the siphon to start and this was rectified by making sure the drain portion of the sump has a contant water level and the two siphon drains are both submerged only about 1.5". I had previously had them extending more than 4" into the sump and I believe the depth prevented the air bubble from pushing itself out fully into the sump due to buoyancy, but that's onnly a guess. Since reducing the depth into the sump, it starts up 99% of the time without problem and I have autofeeders which feed twice daily while timers shut down and start the return pump back up. The system has been running this way since Nov of 2011 with no problems.
I run a filter sock over the end of the drain lines most of the time and have noticed that if I get lazy on changing them out, restarts become problematic due to the increased backpressure of the clogged sock.
I have thought quite a bit about the 1% of the time it doesn't start up properly, it will "flush" repeatedly since the primary drain can't purge the air, the water level in the external overflow rises until the air intake on the "open channel" drain becomes submerged and converts to "closed channel" and sucks the external box nearly dry until it loses suction. At this point, the siphon drain is lost and the external box begins refilling and the cycle repeats.
My thoughts on this are, why does the secondary drain purge air so efficiently and the primary does not? The answer I believe is the air line at the top allows an additional purge path for the air, preventing trapping and compressing the bubble in the top of the siphon piping. I have thought about tapping the primary drain and submerging the air line to the level of the primary siphon intake to see if that helps. But...I'm lazy. It restarts after a couple of tries.
