Drain and return size

You really need to answer the second part of your question before the first part can be answered. If you go with a Herbie style drain then you can actually get away with smaller lines for everything but the emergency. Durso will need a bit larger pipe than Herbie and a gravity fed will probably need a bit more than Durso.

On my 90 I use the two 1" lines in the overflow for a Herbie Durso Hybrid. One line is the primary drain and runs with a valve controlled siphon. The other line is the emergency drain. The Primary drain is 1" pipe all the way to the sump. The Emergency is 1" to the bulkhead and then 1 1/2" from there to the sump. The larger pipe is to help ensure that the emergency is noisy to alert me to an issue with the primary drains flow. There is a gate valve on the primary drain line so that I can adjust the flow to match what is going into the tank from my return. My return is 1" pipe that goes up the back and then splits into two 3/4" lines that run to each end of the tank and then have loc-line to allow for directional control of the return water.

This setup is as close to silent as I have ever had and has been rock solid even with the occasional snail in the pipe incidents.

Keep in mind that my setup uses a DC return pump so I do not run a valve on the return side as I control the flow with the pump speed controller. The overflow on any current 90 gallon can handle more than 1300 gph as I'm running almost 1300gph through mine right now. I do have to keep the Coraline of the teeth but you have to do that with any of them.

Mark still runs AC pumps on his setup because they are easy to find fairly cheap. I'm not sure which type of pump you have.

My Emergency is gravity with no durso and easily handles the entire volume of the water being returned into the tank. Man is it noisy when it does it but it works like a charm. If the water gets too high above the Emergency it will start a full siphon which will move some serious water very quickly until it starts sucking air in again.

I would put a valve on both the return line and the bypass line from your return pump. It's better to be able to control it than to need to and not be able to.

12" weir should be more than enough. The factory weir on a reef ready tank is only 9" maybe 9.75" considering the curve in them. So 12" will actually help give you even more overhead on your return volume. I'm assuming that the 1200gph is the max rating on your pump and not the volume at 5'+ of head pressure, right?

If your location in the United States is anywhere near the more specific location of Davis county you are more than welcome to come visit and see how mine is done.


Edited by Krazie4Acans - November 15 2016 at 8:19am