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Plumbing external overflow box Bean Animal?

MarcosDelgado0

MarcosDelgado0

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So I’m trying to plumb this external overflow box Bean animal style but the protruding bulkheads aren’t giving me much space to work with. Should I just go straight stand pipes or one of the other options? Or any recommendations? Does it matter which order they go in? Currently it’s left to right: emergency, secondary, primary. I would drill a hole for a piece of tubing in the secondaries with fittings
 

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Order doesn’t matter. The emergency and secondary just need to be wide open. Main drain should have the gate valve.

Personally, unless you have a large tank (like 150 gallons or more) and need the extra flow, I don’t know if bean animal actually adds that much benefit over a single siphon and an emergency drain. I understand the extra redundancy, but having an external box and good weir, clogging two drains is unlikely. And in small setups without a lot of space, not having to plumb that third drain saves valuable real estate. In some of my bean animal overflow, I even just capped the third drain.

That said, I usually always just have all stand pipes and really only have flow going down the main drain. If you really want the tickle down the durso (secondary drain) just put it on one of the side drains and use the middle as main drain and emergency the other side drain.
 
RandyC said:
Order doesn’t matter. The emergency and secondary just need to be wide open. Main drain should have the gate valve.

Personally, unless you have a large tank (like 150 gallons or more) and need the extra flow, I don’t know if bean animal actually adds that much benefit over a single siphon and an emergency drain. I understand the extra redundancy, but having an external box and good weir, clogging two drains is unlikely. And in small setups without a lot of space, not having to plumb that third drain saves valuable real estate. In some of my bean animal overflow, I even just capped the third drain.

That said, I usually always just have all stand pipes and really only have flow going down the main drain. If you really want the tickle down the durso (secondary drain) just put it on one of the side drains and use the middle as main drain and emergency the other side drain.
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Thanks! I’m going to do all stand pipes and see how it sounds. Worst case I can always modify it.
 
I think this may help. Below is IM's pre-plumbed design for their 50-200g tanks. This gave me the base design for my setup when I was planning.
1718297418719.png
 
can't you cut down the bulkheads or would that cause bulkhead to break, not seal?

if you have snails, screens on the pipes can be a good idea. dumb snails always find a way to get stuck in pipes.
 
psidriven said:
can't you cut down the bulkheads or would that cause bulkhead to break, not seal?

if you have snails, screens on the pipes can be a good idea. dumb snails always find a way to get stuck in pipes.
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In the instructions it says to use a hack saw to trim the bulkheads but I feel like that’s just asking to crack. Has anyone done this successfully?
 
Let's test to see if I've gained a tiny bit of plumbing insight after all the journals I've been following.

My guess/ question would be are the gate valves possibly for future reactors or equipment? (I had to hold the picture with two hands to make it zoom a little)

You can't really see what they go to however with the current pictures, so my guess is based soley on their placement.
 
MichaelB said:
Let's test to see if I've gained a tiny bit of plumbing insight after all the journals I've been following.

My guess/ question would be are the gate valves possibly for future reactors or equipment? (I had to hold the picture with two hands to make it zoom a little)

You can't really see what they go to however with the current pictures, so my guess is based soley on their placement.
Click to expand...
Yeah the gate valves are on a manifold on the return line. In the future if I needed to, I can attach equipment to it and use the gate valves to adjust the flow feeding whatever I plug in. A lot of people use ball valves for manifolds but I figured I’d go with gate valves for their more manageable flow control and they weren’t that much more expensive.

That’s weird with the images. Im on IOS mobile and on my end they look ok. It allows me to select an image and it expand and I can zoom in with two fingers if needed.
 
H2OPlayar said:
I can't zoom in on the images, can you upload in another format? I think it looks good but there are a lot of gate valves that I can't see where they go
Click to expand...

If it helps, in the there is one 1” gate valve at the end of the primary drain line. The three 1/2” gate valves are on the manifold. There will be one more 1” gate valve on the pvc pipe running down to the return pump which is not in the images because I don’t have the pump yet
 
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