Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I was not happy with the volume coming out of my pond pump that I bought for one of my son's science projects about a year ago. It pumps enough water to fill my grow bed (Partial IBC) in about 6 minutes.

I don't recall how many GPM that it pumps, but I figured a bit more could not hurt. Plus, since we're adding 3 additional grow beds and about 1500L of additional sump I wanted room for expansion.

I picked up a submersible 2866 GPM (@23 foot max head) solids capable pump.

I proceeded to set the output pipe size at 2" and dropped it in my sump.

From the time it took me to plug in the pump, realize that it was moving water and unplug it, it had already pumped almost 50 gallons out of my sump and came close to overflowing my fish tank.

The head from the bottom of my sump to my fish tank is 7 feet. This pump is crazy strong.

Holy smokes!

This is the pump.
http://www.harborfreight.com/34-horsepo ... 69299.html

I need to figure out a good way to throttle the output of this pump, and install an overflow pipe from my fishtank back to the sump.


Yet another lesson learned. Do a bit of math before purchasing a pump. I suppose if I had 5000L of sump and a huge fish tank this one would be OK. Thankfully, I'd picked it up on a sale for $39.00 USD.

For the fun of it, I placed a 2 inch T in the fill pipe to run water directly back into the sump.

It looked like about 1/3 of the water bypassed the fish tank.

I think that if i put a ball valve on the pipe after the T that I will be able to redirect enough of the water back to the sump to not worry about overflowing my tank.

This much water moving will certainly help to aerate the water.

Sounds like it is a bit over sized. lol
not a massive pump though, i assume you mean 2866gpH, not minute.
I run an 8000l/hr pump normally.

Good luck finding the right pump next time.

Funny thing was that my old pump was supposed to be 1200 GPH. (finally found the packaging)
But, this new pump is probably moving 10X the water.

yea doesnt surprise me, some pond pumps move lots of water for little energy cost, but will only ever have a crap head, some do alot better, but use more power.
those sump pumps (which i also use) tend to use more power for the given flow, but will do a better head.
e.g. mine supposedly does 8kl/hr at 0 head, but also does 8kl/hr at 2m head, it starts dropping from there.

8K LPH. Must be a fairly good size system.

started out about 5kl with that pump, up to about 10kl, lol.

Just for future reference. The head that the pump is pumping is from the top of you sump water level, not the bottom.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk

i dont know what the power prices are like in america but in australia it would be well worth your while to size your pump appropriately to your system.

I got a 5000l/h pump for $130 that runs 35w as apposed to much cheaper($40) pump that would pump the same for twice the electricity. I worked out that it would pay for itself in a year with 24/7 use.

you may well find that you could afford a new pump based on the savings for the forth coming year. Could keep that one for other purposes.

It can help.

Heh.

Now, I'm thankful that I had picked up this pump. Over the last weekend, I added 3 more grow beds to the system. With the additional capacity, the old pump was not able to fill them all.

So, here's what I did.

Added a 2" overflow pipe from the fish tank to back into the sump.
Added a 2" ball valve to the fill pipe from the pump to the fish tank.

Between the overflow and the ball valve, I was able to get the fill rates perfect. Not much water is overflowing back into the sump. Maybe 2-5 gallons per minute. The beds are all filling nicely and there is a lot more oxygen making it into the water.

Next, I'll need to build a larger sump. With 4 beds, I've maxed out what we're currently using.