Fishroom Reality Check

First fill? Exciting!
Nah- return plumbing test.

I filled up my return chamber -27 gallons- and shot it upstairs to check the plumbing. I tweaked the controller until I was hitting 800gph, and it’s now running at 61% compared to 76% in the last build, but the run is like half the distance.

had to do that in 30 second intervals in order to not run the return chamber dry.

got a few more hits of plumbing to set then I’ll be washing everything down. I still need to wash my old sand, planned for this week, but I anticipate a RODI fill sometime early next week.
And since I got that all done ahead of schedule, I also started hanging fishroom plywood sheathing

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Moving some hvac. I HATE fiberglass about as much as I hate drilling concrete and drywall missing

this is temporarily. I’m visualizing running the main trunk in a soffit against the wall opposite the sump, then running the subruns in the joist spaces. That way- I only need to build 2 short soffit runs and they will be away from the walls were I need to run electrical

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Hung another piece of sheathing.

the neat thing about building things to code, is that when you have a piece of plywood sheathing that had a drain line running through it, it’ll just slot right into the wall with the drain line in your new fishroom. I just had to patch a little since it wasn’t lined up quite right horizontally, but it was perfectly positioned vertically
 

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Got the overflow cleaned, all the pipes doped and set, and painted the return line blue since I didn’t twist the pipe the correct direction when I glued the fittings and I ended up with visible writing through the glass. Such an idiot

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Tap- for a leak test. Plus it gives me something to rinse the tank with- pretty dusty in there with the move and sitting about

I have 1 pinhole leak to take care of, then I’ll be running this until Monday afternoon to ensure leak free, the dump and start adding my rodi.
 
Plumbing is completely done (other than the run to the QT area for WC) and leak-free. I even got some time to clean all my old sand, and do the first real test of the filter tube. System is running a little slow, around 650 gph, and the backpressure of the filter tube is sending water down the secondary drain in the settling tank.

That’s fine, but it does mean I’m getting less than total flow through the filter- estimate maybe 80/20. Unfortunately, my main drain valve in that tank is full
Open, so I’m going to have to go up a pipe size to get complete flow through, or slow down the sump flow some more.

however- that still puts me in the 3-4x system volume through the sump per hour, which I like, so I may tune it later, or not.

so- run it with tap until the kids nap tomorrow, drain it, clean it, then add sand and start the rodi fill

 
I wasn’t planning on staying up all night reading a build thread but I might have to now haha. On page 30/117 so far. This is amazing!
Sorry bro... right around page 114, I rip it all down so can move house!

sorry for the spoiler, lol!
Stick with it though- it’s a good thread, lots of great info, even if I do say so myself
 
system is running, just some tweaking of the BA to do.

i filled the sump with SW, so now just waiting for the SW and Rodi to mix, and get to adjusting the salinity to 1.026

 

IF YOU HAD TO TAKE A REEFING EXAM, WOULD YOU PASS?

  • Yes!

    Votes: 32 45.7%
  • Not yet, but I have one that I want to buy in mind!

    Votes: 9 12.9%
  • No.

    Votes: 26 37.1%
  • Other (please explain).

    Votes: 3 4.3%

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