Getting snails out of drains.

[jccaclimber]

My current (still telling myself it's temporary) reef has an overflow gap small enough that the bulldozers turbo snails can't get anywhere near the drain. However, I'm in desperate need of some snails and they weren't available so I added a few trochus snails. Of course one crawled down the drain.
My drain isn't the most straight forward because the tank originally had a center (left/right and front/back) overflow tower and now has a c-c on the back wall. So, overflow box underneath the eurobrace, rigid PVC, 90° bend, more PVC, 90° bend, bulkhead, short tubing section, thread in hose barb, flex hose. I'm not sure where it was stuck, but it wasn't near the entrance and I wasn't getting a good grasp on it in any case.

One quick puff of compressed air and poof, shell right back out the way it came in.

Quick, painless, and given that there's maybe one trochus crawling around at this point and the drain inlet isn't accessible, I have not yet learned my lesson well enough to go about putting an extra screen on the inlet*.

*There is both a backup drain with more capacity than the return pump as well as a level sensor to shut off the return pump if it tries to overflow, so that's a low enough risk for me to be comfortable if this happens again.

 

[jccaclimber]

Time to revisit this one. It turned out that two trochus snails survived, and both of them rather quickly outgrew the ability to fit through the overflow gap, that or they heard the tortured souls of their brethren warning them not to go down the drain. Either way, they are now bigger than the gap and I never did have to rescue or recover either of them.

While I still haven't ordered the couple dozen Mexican turbo snails I want, I did pick up a few zebra turbos at Aquatic Collection. I didn't think anything of it, and most of them don't fit there anyways. They weren't getting the job done and I found myself passing by Aquatic Collection yesterday on the way back from a work errand. Why not support a nice local store? I picked up 50 baby astreas* and 20 snails that were labelled as turbos. Most of them were zebra turbos, the rest were...I'm not sure, but I wasn't watching closely as they were catching them. After inspecting the 70 (I didn't count) snails up close and personal for pests they made their way into my tank....and this evening I heard a familiar gurgling sound. Out with the air compressor line. Didn't hear the telltale sign of a snail blowing out the top, and the line was still clogged. This one (a zebra turbo) was still living, and hanging on. Fortunately it was stuck about 1.5" down from the inlet where I have a slight restriction, so after some gentle convincing I was able to lift it out with my finger tips.

Yes, there are now egg crate snail guards over both of my drain line inlets.

*People I know have mixed opinions between "never get astreas, they die too fast" and "I've never had a problem" so seeing as they were 1/5 the price of the trochus I decided I should have some first hand experience.

 

[JVU]

You used a serious air compressor or just compressed air can? You just blast the air backwards from a farther-down segment? Are you are taking the overflow pipe apart at a union or blasting from the outflow in the sump?

 

[jccaclimber]

I’m using a couple second puff out of a line regulated to around 100 psi out of an air compressor. Of course given that I’m sealing the connection with my hand, line resistance, and so on I doubt the line sees much pressure. It’s more a way to get a high flow rate. The outlet of a shop vac or leaf blower would probably do it too, although my shop vac outlet air is pretty dirty and I neither own a leaf blower, nor want to operate one indoors.

My drain ends in a section of 1” hose, so I lift that out of the sump, insert the nozzle, and pull the trigger.

It actually works a bit better without the restriction of the nozzle, but then I need my wife to open and close the valve back at the compressor to regulate it and I didn’t want to bother her at the time.

I’d really love to have a manifold so that I could plumb the return pump to one of the drains temporarily, but that’s more work and mess than I want to deal with right now.