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.
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.
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???
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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!
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.
