I love that this is my thread and I get to tease you guys all I want! So with that, I must apologize ahead of time for that and say that this is not a Neptune Systems announcement.
Instead what I did yesterday was put in place a pump on my tank that was sent in for Apex Ready testing. It completely blew me away. Some of you have for surely heard of it, others have seen it in action, and many have thought - meh, its a pump, why should a pump cost that much?
What I am talking about is the
Abyzz A400 pump. Real photos will soon follow later today, but I wanted to at least let you all off the hook and give you the info.
So, let me tell you my experience.
Once I received the pump, I was wondering how I was going to hook it up - it has metric slip fittings and comes with some adapter rings. So I bought all these pieces at Home Depot and came home. They all turned out to be unnecessary.
As you know I have a internal (submerged) application (mainly to keep the heat from the pump) that is has been running a RD230 for about 8 months - and doing an amazing job really. I turned off the RD and took off the adapter segment of pipe I have (basically a 300mm segment of 1.5” pipe that has a union on one end and the RD union fitting on the other.) I then took the adapter segment and behold, the union internal diameter fit exactly over the output of the A400 and rested on the ridge - 40mm diameter exactly I guess - not a sealed fit, but good . Just for giggles I put the pump in the sump with piece and it was the exact same height as the red dragon. Perfect fit. If they did not intentionally design it this way (the same vertical offset as the RD) it was an awesome lucky coincidence. The plumbing put enough downward force that the pipe and pump was not going anywhere. Would it be a perfect seal - no - but this was internal anyways - so what if there was an super-tiny loss.
Now I went to turn it on. I have 80' meters of 2” of flex PVC plumbing under the house and about 15' of vertical head - altogether about 16' of head pressure when you include the pipe distance. I have a 2” clear check valve right above the pump so I do not lose all that water on pump power down.
So I turned on the pump and at about 50% it finally opened the check valve against all the head pressure. At 70% I ran upstairs and could not believe the flow. Somewhere around 2x the RD by my estimation - the RD flowed a nice gentle flow - but this was a power stream. At 75% I went upstairs again - crazy. At 80% I went upstairs and said “OK, we are now above the level of safe” in terms of the ability to gravity drain the flow. So I went downstairs, quickly threw on a Kill-a-watt and the pump was doing 250W. WOW! Amazing. Well over double the flow of the RD at nearly the same wattage. So I backed off the pump to 72% and it is flowing about twice as hard as the RD at 200W at the wall (180 on the A400 display). Amazing my friend. Wow.
Now there are people in the business I associate with that think this pump is just far too expensive. What is the justification they say. I thought the same thing, frankly. Until now. If someone has a two floor situation with a tank over 300g they are already spending $15-30K. This should be a no brainer. This is especially true in areas like mine where the cost of power is about $0.28 per kWh. I did the math and just the difference between the A400 and the RD is about $144 a year. Not much but still a savings. However, if you needed the flow of one of those external pressure pumps that usually draw 450W, you would easily be saving $500-$600 a year…not to mention the reduced carbon footprint!
I know this pump is way out of the price range of most, but if you don't mind paying for super high quality (and a lifetime warranty) and want this kind of power efficiency, I doubt anything on the market will touch it.
For those that are wondering why I would talk so highly of this product when we currently have our own pump in the works, this is a pump in a completely different class and for a totally different market than we are aiming for with the COR.
Later this week I will start testing it with the 0-10V control on my Apex.
