added a return pump , having issues

Laura and Jim will be hosting the May meeting this Saturday the 12th and it will be the usual of food, drinks, raffle and fun.
 
Doors will be open at 6:00 pm for social talk and the meeting will start at 7:00.  Parking gets a little tight and the city says you can't park on 4th but there is a parking lot a block away.   Meeting is usually held in the backyard so feel free to bring your favorite lawn chair, weather permitting of course.

If you need address/directions, contact a club member.

Best if you park at Mini Mall (where the spaghetti establishment use to be)
 
You will get to see his new frag tank set up in the making.
 
Hope to see you there!

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[leigekiller]

Hey all, I changed out my lower GPH return pump for a Genx 1160 GPH pump but I am having two issues that I hope someone has a possible fix for.
1) tiny bubbles from the pump, lots of them
2)the whirlpool effect, my sump isn't deep enough to keep the suction from the pump from creating a whirlpool to the top of the water level and sucking air in, probably causing issue #1 ;P

any thoughts?

Thanks
Daniel Hahn

[Kyleb100]

Do you have any pics of your sump layout?  I can almost guarantee the whirlpool effect is causing the micro bubbles.  Why can't you just add more water to your sump(while still maintaining loss of power overflow protection) to raise the level enough in order to fix the whirlpool?

[leigekiller]

I dont atm but I will try and post one tomorrow, one solution that a friend came up with was adding a T junction at the bottom of the intake to allow it to pull water in from 2 different locations in the sump.

[Danielie21]

That may make it worse. The only thing I can think of is to raise the water lvl in your return section of your sump.

[Ed]

Hello Dan,
      Here are two suggestions.

One,  use of a gate valve to adjust flow.

Two, Use 45 degree elbow at inlet possibly or a T pipe with two 45 degree elbows facing downward.   You can drill a small in hole in the elbows to release trapped air at highest part of elbows.

I have always been taught that you need 3-5 times turn over in your sump/return flow.   Here is one reason why.   You need contact time for your skimmer to work properly.   

for example, if you have a 100 gallon tank.   You need 300 - 500 gallon return pump. 

[leigekiller]

I will try out some of these and let you guys know what changes effect things

Ed, as a side note what I have been reading on the turnover is considerably higher than what you stated here, 10x + for an active tank, with some going very much higher than that.
 

maybe we should get some research and get a thread going on it see what we can do for institutional club knowledge.

Daniel

[Ed]

not sure what you are saying in your idea of  Turnover.  If you have one sump the above ratio is accurate.    If you are splitting drain line so you  can run a refugeum or added tank Then devide by two.  Do you mean the flow inside the tank?   That is totally different.    You want contact time for your skimmer to work properly.    I hope this helps.

[leigekiller]

yes I was speaking whole tank my misunderstandiong, I had not seen any articles on the sump area turnover itself.