Questions on Making a Sump Less Noisy

This weekend I was able to get my new 135 gallon tank (thanks again to Tony for helping me get things up and running). This is my first tank that I've owned that was drilled for a sump, and being that it is an acrylic tank, I decided to use the sump for filtration.

While I've been keeping fish for a long time, I've always stayed away from sumps because 1) I've never owned a drilled tank before and 2) the fear of overflowing the sump always outweighed everything else. Now that I have the right situation, it was a no brainer to get it set up.

To my question - the tank has dual overflows, so I have drain lines coming from both sides of the tank into a tee fitting that runs directly into the sump. One drain line is semi-rigid and runs more or less directly to the top of the sump itself. The other drain line is the ribbed, flexible hose that looks kind of like a drain line off a washing machine. This line comes from the bulkhead, loops below the top of the sump, and back up to the tee fitting.

The best I can tell, there are two main "sources" of noise. The first comes from the drain lines themselves, and the splashing noise as the water enters the sump. I tried multiple configurations in the sump (drip plate, no drip plate, floss on drip plate) and the differences were negligible. The other noise is more of a gurgle, and it seems to come from the overflow with the flexible hose connected to it. The gurgle isn't consistent, and occurs every 4-5 seconds or so. Somehow, air is getting in the system, but I'm not quite sure how.

Any ideas how to make things quieter? The overflows have durso standpipes, although I'm not 100% sure how that plays into the equation.

Jon,

The first thing I would do is play around with the vacuum hose to remove any bends and such. What's happening is that you've got a loop, where bubbles accumulate. The bubble gets bigger and bigger, until the force of the water is sufficient to knock it out, and then it gurgles. This is happening every 4-5 seconds on yours. As an alternative, if you replace the whole thing with PVC, and it's well designed, you can eliminate these gurgles all together.

Also, look into something called a "herby overflow." You use both holes in the overflow box as intakes, with the larger ones (with the durso) acting as an emergency overflow. The smaller ones get a ball valve, and you adjust the ball valve until, basically, flow in = flow out. This creates a syphon, rather than an overflow, and this is absolutely silent. Should something block the syphon, you'd have a problem, but the larger durso acts as an emergency counter to this. The downside is that you have to either drill a new hole for the water return (no thanks) or just plumb it up and over the side of the tank. Not a big deal.

You can cut down on the amount of noise in the sump itself by making sure your water is passing through a good distributor pipe (like a spray bar) before entering the sump. You can play around with some configurations of PVC to better distribute it.

Ultimately, once you eliminate the gurgling, though, it's not any noisier than a Power Filter.

My friend had the same problem. We changed all the bulkheads to threaded on the bottom, and converted to PVC with threaded couplings and ball valves so the system can be taken appart if needed. Gurgling gone.

If you do this, just make sure the pipes have no spots where they point in an upward angle.

Have you checked this silent standpipe design.

http://www.dursostandpipes.com/

There are other good idea from this web site on sump system.

this work for me
For the overflows you can cut a pvc pipe to fit inside to dampen the sound
the idea is to raise the level in the overflow box a little just enough and inch or 2

I have durso standpipes in both overflows.

Jon, if you'd like, I can come show you how to set up the Herby system. It's really completely silent.

JLW said:

Jon, if you'd like, I can come show you how to set up the Herby system. It's really completely silent.

Click to expand...

Let's talk on Saturday at the meeting. I'm super sketchy about overflowing something.

But I may take you up on having you come take a look at things...