If you can return those pumps, they are overkill by a wide margin.....bear with me on this explanation. (Plus a question or two.)
Correct me if this is the wrong sterilizer:
Vecton V2 600: UV 25 Watt (160 Gallons) / T.M.C. / UV Sterilizers / Saltwater / Dry Goods - Quality Marine
Can you throw the tubing connectors in the parts bin and hard-plumb this thing?
[Much later...] OK, found the manual via Google:
https://fishkeeper-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2014-07-03/1c8f36ef520bea439f6bc2e9662043db.pdf
Yes you can hard plumb it, but they want you to buy a kit. That could mean there are proprietary parts involved or not.
run it around Level 1 Sterilization instead of Level 2.
Precisely what does this mean? (I'm still looking for some documentation on this unit....dose rates don't seem to be on the website or in the manual!)
That includes 2-90° on the UV itself, which is 2 feet right there.
No. A rule of thumb shorthand measurement that doesn't apply here. We'll get to the specifics...
The unit is 20" long, which horizontal is 10" of head.
Ditto.
the rest is a normal run from the pump to the UV (which is diagonal, not straight up)
It's mostly the vertical that matters unless you have a pretty long or elaborate plumbing run, or high flor, or small plumbing, or...
We're getting to the specifics...
There isn't a "specific" thing I'm trying to kill.
You need to refine your strategy so you are. You can't really target a "correct" setup without knowing the purpose of the setup.
In general, you can kill teeny tiny things like phytoplankton and smaller, or bigger things like parasites. I haven't run a TMC unit before, but unless there's trickery involved the unit should require a very different flow and maybe a very different setup to achieve control on the different size-classes of organisms.
The tank isn't setup yet, but it's a Marineland RR 180 on the 34" Monterey stand.
Ok, the details we need. Draw us a picture if you have some thing more elaborate planned, but what I'm calculating on is this:
Basically a separate return directly from the sump to the tank from each of these UV's. I may be confused but it sounds like you also plan on running a third return that will not be UV controlled. I'm not sure you will want (or need) to do this in the end, so correct me if I'm wrong.
34"+24" puts the rim of the tank about 58" off the ground. Round up to 60".
Apparently you calculate head-pressure from the sump water level, which I'll assume to be 6".
This puts your
base head pressure at 52". Less than 4.5 feet.
I would normally add one foot for the usual extra length to from point A to B, but if the UV unit is 12" long we'll add two feet.
Total plumbing length we'll assume to be 52 + 24 = 76"
We'll assume one 90º elbow for getting the flow into the tank, and two capped-off Tee's on the sterilizer. (They aren't elbows if you look at it. And honestly at the flow rates we're talking they aren't going to figure in significantly anyway.)
Your target flow for the sump should generally be around 2x to 4x the display size in GPH.
So for a 180 Gallon tank that range would be 360 GPH (2x) up to 720 GPH (4x). Anything in the range and you know skimmers and media reactors are well fed and the system will work fine.
I'd normally just target 4x flow to make the numbers as conservative as possible for purposes of pump selection.
But in your case, I've read this from the QM link above:
It looks like you could nearly service the whole tank with a single unit run at maximum 505 GPH of flow.
(They don't show dosage rates though, so again: what is that 505 GPH actually treating? You have to know what that means and you have to know what you're targeting.)
Because I'm assuming you want to target something more than "the minimum" and maybe even parasites ("the maximum") I'll assume you want no more than 50% of that maximum flow rate. (The manufacturer really needs to confirm the correct number.)
In that case, two V600's will still give your sump 500 GPH, which is
plenty of flow for everything. So we'll assume 500 GPH total for UV.
BTW, you could probably run this whole thing from the return pump that it sounds like you already have (BLDC5, correct?) and I think that might even be the smart way to do it, but...
I'm sticking with the two separate but identical UV channels and Sicce pumps for the example. That means 250 GPH for each UV channel.
Summary for each UV return channel:
52" base head height
76" plumbing length
250 GPH
1 90º, 2 Tee's
Breaking post.....part 2 coming.
