Made some big progress today courtesy of ERIC69. He was kind enough to offer up his services for plumbing and we got the vast majority of the complex plumbing completed today.
Today's plumbing included running the return to the remote equipment. This includes the frag tank (65G) that we re-plumbed now that the floor is finished. It also included the equipment area in the utility room for the chiller, the refuge and the media reactor setup.
Here is the drain line bringing all the plumbing back from the remote equipment into the sump.
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Eric had a good suggestion of running the lines through the wall behind the 300 stand into the pantry, then into the utility room. We then came back through the wall behind the frag tank itself. This eliminated any visible plumbing into the room itself. We will patch the old access hole and texture/paint it so the wall looks as good as new next time around.
Return/Drain coming going into the Pantry.
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Drain and Return for the Frag Tank hidden by the stand/tank itself.
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Look Ma! No more PVC showing.... hole will be fixed.
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Shelf in the Pantry... eaten up by the plumbing. But a single guy doesn't need pantry space
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Here is the new plumbing where the old sump was. These lines include the return feed and the drain, along with the inlets/outlets for all the media reactors. Each of these has valves to shut off the reactors for maintenance. The trick on this setup was the drain line. Because the drain is gravity drain, the flow will push the water through the reactors and up into the drain above. Due to the 90 use to connect it to the drain itself, when the flow is shut off with the valves on the right, the drain will not backflow. We tested this out by opening the drains and sure enough, not a drop despite the entire thing running.
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Here is the chiller. Given the temp I keep the house, Frank and I figured the existing chiller will be enough to keep the system in check. I will monitor it over the summer, but this chiller didn't run much at all before so I don't think it will have a problem even though its technically a size too small. Already it took the entire system down 2 degrees after having the house open and warmer add-on water put into the system.
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Another feature of the new plumbing is going to be inline probes. Using the T's you see here, I will use compression fittings to insert the pH and ORP probe into the plumbing line. This will give a better and more accurate reading real time and eliminate the probes from the sump entirely. It will be much cleaner. The fittings are on order, so they will be installed once they get here, for now we just plugged the openings with screw plugs.
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I should be getting the side cabinet for the tank in tomorrow or Monday. Then all those cords and wires will be cleaned up and I can get all the top off and dosing lines run. I still need to run those through the wall, but I may just end up following the same setup as we did for the plumbing instead of going through that hole in the wall or putting a new one in.
Wait until you see the cabinet
Its got some really nice little features and surprises in store.....
