I did most of the heavy lifting for the sump plumbing yesterday. All it had to do was dry overnight. My goal today was to fire up some pumps, just to get water moving through a sump, try to tune out the issues I could. With that in mind, I remembered that for some unknown reason, I disconnected one of the 3/4" return tubes inside the overflow. Why on earth did I do this? I think my plan was to stop back siphon by taking them off, but it turned out I couldn't even get the second one to budge, so I just abandoned it.
This, was super problematic today. I stopped the flow from the durso by flipping it upside down when I shut the sumps down. So now I was trying to work around that, and get this awful tube back on the fitting. Vinyl tubing after 10+ years, not so pliable. It's like trying to jam SCH40 onto a barb fitting, and with the durso in there upside down, taking up most of the weir, it was impossible to even get a grip on the thing. I stared at it awhile, and then got desperate. I couldn't replace it, because the connection on the other end is at the bottom of a 36" weir, that is about 12"x8", so I can't even touch the bottom. (I honestly do not remember the arcane trick I did to get it on in the first place) So I grabbed an extra-long set of needle-nose pliers. I put the end inside the hose, and opened them repeatedly, in different directions, to kind of work the tube with the hopes it would soften up without just splitting in half. Luckily it did open up very slightly, just enough that I could spend the next 30 minutes jiggling it onto the barb fitting. I am so glad I only ever took one of these off...
Having done that, it was time to fire up the left side. I took the hacked up tube off, and threw the durso back on. It was now time to witness the power of this fully operational 2" Durso Standpipe. Well.. maybe.. Turns out since I shut the RO/DI down in the electrical fire a week or so ago, the tank level dropped a bit. In what was pretty much one tremendous gulp, it sucked the water level down to the finger cutouts, and was done. It was a spectacular gulp though.
So I went down to the sump side, lets see what we dumped in there. A few inches of water, enough to cover the pump, not much else. Nothing left to do put put it back where I found it. I plugged in the COR20, immediately turned the power down pretty much as low as it would go, and got the system into equilibrium. There is basically a trickle of water moving up and down now, definitely not enough to even look at the other sump funny.
OK, well, lets try the skimmer then. I'm sure this water needs some love. Plug it in, turn the pump down, hey, what's that noise? Well the pond liner underside of the aquarium came in handy instantly. I had the skimmer set to min, which shoved all the water up the pipe, and immediately overflowed the cup, and started gushing around. Bonus points for the pond liner catching all of it and keeping my floor dry! Fixed the settings on the skimmer, set it super low, just to let it do it's thing, and things look safe now.
So one problem with my DIY LED's, is that I tried to do a good job of managing the mess of cables, but it wasn't really that great. I relied on those little stick-on cable tie mounts, which held for probably all of 15 minutes. So I had some gnarly clumps of wire in what looked like a rat's nest in a hanging garden. I knew one of the things on my long term plan was to go passive cooling on the LED's, so I don't need those fan wires anymore. So very carefully, I measured and coiled the wires, removed the fan wires, and installed some 3D-printed screw-in ziptie holders on the wall.
That picture makes it look alot worse than it really is. Now it's all up high, secured tightly, and out of the way. From the back it looks a thousand times better.
In the great flood, one of the only things that survived was the LED setup, which I carefully bolted to a chunk of MDF on the wall next to the tank. I was very careful about setting this up, and I think it came out pretty clean. I decided this would be my map for the rest of the electrical. I got some 2'x2' plywood sheets, painted them (just to kinda look nice-ish, with whatever random samples I had lying about), and secured them to the wall. I then went around and started bolting up everything that was ready to be connected, routing some of the wires, etc. I had printed some nice mounts for my power bricks. I did not want them sitting on the floor, or some shelf where they would inevitably be in a pool of water. Bolted it all up, and huzzah!
Still much to add here, waiting for parts to come in the mail. Everything is plugged into the wall socket while I wait for the new Apex to arrive and solve all of my problems via magic.
Finally, after hours of scrubbing from my loving wife, the TLF reactors were all clean and ready to be installed. In last night's episode, we left you with the cliffhanger that we would try stretching out the vinyl tubing to see if we could make it workable overnight. Turns out, yes, we did. Unclamped it, and it was pretty much straight, almost no coil to it at all. This made it super simple to cut to length, and re-plumb the media reactors. A few minutes later and they were done.
Day 3 comes to a close, and I have some RO/DI dripping into a bucket to make saltwater. I'm not really exhausted tonight, so that's a win. I go to sleep, dreaming of a UPS van filled with more parts.
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