Surge Tank

[wkopplin]

Can someone explain to me how a surge tank works? I want a little more flow on my tank and am looking into installing a surge tank, but I do not know how to make one.

[R_S_C]

here's a decent write-up

http://www.breeders-registry.gen.ca.us/Reprints/SeaScope/v13_sumr/surge.htm

[matt]

There are a couple of different designs. For a start, I'd look in the Borneman book (Aquarium Corals) because he has a detailed plan for one. It uses a toilet valve. There are others that use no valve, just a siphon break. That design I believe is called the "carlson" design. Either way, basically you pump water from your sump into a container higher than the tank, and when it fills up it drains quickly into the tank, creating a surge.

You have the ideal set up for this due to your fish room. The downside of these devices is that they make some noise, and will put some bubbles into your tank. Also, you need a water level in your tank low enough so accomodate the rapid increase in water. I've seen videos of these things in action, and it's pretty amazing. Most commercial aquariums have some sort of surge as well. Next tank for me will have one for sure.

[wkopplin]

Could you hook the surge tank up to a sea swirl?

[Sunhutch]

Does anyone know if the reef tanks at Sea World have this? Just wondering.

[matt]

I don't see why you couldn't hook up the surge to a sea swirl, as long as the flow from the surge doesn't exceed the sea swirl's capacity. Personally, though, i wouldn't. I'd want the surge to have a couple of big outlets at one end of the tank, so the surge could travel the full length.

I've had another idea for a surge for a while. It consists of two cylinders and pistons, one drawing water from one side of the tank while the other is adding water to the other side. Then the pistons reverse directions and the flow is reversed. The advantage is that the net volume in the tank never changes. I got this idea from the huge piston surge devices at sea world.

[wkopplin]

What would drive the pistons? I remember you mentioning this before. I am interested, let's build one.

[reefer]

check out this reverse carlson surge device, it uses pnuematics to drive the wave motion in your tank. i'm sure matt could create something like this out of acrylic easily!http://www.petsforum.com/cis-fishnet/seascope/00SS1705.htm
8)

[GaryP]

I think this is pretty common to the huge wave makers they use in some water parks, just on a smaller scale.

Surf's up dude.

Gary

[matt]

The 2 ways I can think of driving the piston are with a worm gear down the center of the cylinder and with a pivot arm, kind of like the oil well type.

The advantage of a device like this is that a lot of water is moved without any water having to go through a pump impeller; completely plankton friendly. With a worm gear, you could use one large cylinder mounted horizontal with the outlets located at either end of the cylinder. As the piston traveled from one end to the other, water would get pushed back and forth. Simple. The only thing difficult about the whole thing would be to get good seals at the piston and worm gear, and finding the right kind of magnetic drive to turn the worm gear. Way beyond my abilities. Find a mechanical engineer with a lot of time on his/her hands.

But, maybe the simplest approach would be to use a pump and somehow switch the in/out from side to side, sort of like a sqwd, but electrically controlled and working on both the in and out, so that at a specific interval, the input and output of the pump was switched to opposite sides of the tank. Guess who could build this for you? The guy from oceans motions.

[Lynn]

A few years ago I tried the "dump bucket" type of approach...above the tank, I had two containers that filled and dumped after reaching a certain level of containment. They would then tip upwards and fill back up...lots of water movement but too much agitation ... blocked alot of light and created alot of waterspray....but it was interesting to watch. Didn't cost much to fabricate. You get what you pay for..... :shock:

[reefer]

the boreman surge device i built last year didn't work to well for me. sometimes the flapper valve would oscilate or fail to open or close. i believe that there are electronic controlled gate valves that you could use to elimate the flapper and control it using a level controller like a reef-fanatic auto-topoff. just an idea.....

[Tim Marvin]

I built the carlsons, they work off of syphons. They never failed! The toilet flapper ones I tried failed almost daily. You can't use a seaswirl because they dump a tremendous amount of water out of 2 inch pipes and a seaswirl would not be able to handle 20 gallons in a couple seconds. This has been my experience. Sea World has like a oil well type pump that moves a huge amount of water back and forth in that massive display tank!!!! Very exciting to see it work!

[Sunhutch]

Yes there very impressive. Very cool water movement on those tanks. The sound however is pretty overpowering.

[Tim Marvin]

Kopplins set-up is in the garage....SOund shouldn't be a problem.

[wkopplin]

Sound is not a problem. Cost might be.......

[Brett Wilson]

here's some random but interesting trivia regarding surge tanks.

In England all of the bathroom urinals are setup on a slow surge tank for flushing.
Charming, I know!

:-p
-Brett

[z28pwr]

Here's another one.

http://saltaquarium.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aquatouch.com%2F surge_b.htm