Nice Cheap DIY Overflow

[Stapedius]

To make things a little clearer, I attached the thermo guard onto an elbow, they are then connected to the water inlet (the open pipe)...... the length of the U tubes are 2/3 the height of the tank at 40cm.

[gilbertjanke]

I made this overflow out of 1.25" pvc following the instructions in this thread and it works great. Made it about 8 months ago for my 90g Freshwater Cichlid tank and it works like a charm. It hasnt lost its siphon yet! It was a little louder than i hoped, but i was able to quiet it down by wrapping the outside with cotton material.

Thanks everyone for the awesome thread!

[airtruck]

might try 2 of them , dont have any prob with air it sucks them bubbles right thru. was noisy so put a 90' on the downpipe vent and pointed away with a peice of foam way less noise. white pvc 1" id do you think a 1 1/4 or 1 1/2 flow rates would be alot better? dont want to loose the fast flow and start collecting air, will t the sump back into itself to slow the flow for now , it keeps up but just by the skin of its teeth. (edited) i cut the flow down too 400-350 gph works flawless..

[Ducksmasher]

one thing i see is dont shorten the outer vent pipe.. if there was a restriction in your hose, then the water level would travel up a shorter vent tube till it spilled over and you would dump water on the floor.. whatever your overflow of your main tank would be. I would keep the outer tube taller than inside intake tube for sure... Im building two today and placing them behind a overflow box in the main tank to hide/strain behind.

[StackTrayce]

Success! I had read the first 6 pages or so of this thread while doing PVC overflow research. I made one and it seems to work (in a test bucket at least!). At first it didn't work well, but once I added the hole with the air tubing and check valve and sucked the air out via the tubing everything seems to be working fine. I am letting the PVC cement cure overnight as well as allowing me to test a multi-hour power outage.
I made mine out of 3/4" as I expect this to a be a semi low-flow application. No noise when testing w/ the bucket. I will be working on a different strainer/intake next.

[StackTrayce]

My overflow is working but I am having trouble with the actual drain into the sump after all the pvc Us and out the 45 degree bend. I tried "spa tubing" and it made a good seal, but it is far too inflexible for me to position it the way I want. I went to a hardware store and checked out some clear cable with fibers braided in it. This is flexible enough but doesn't make a tight fit. BTW I am using 3/4" I.D. PVC for all of this.

[Ducksmasher]

whats wrong with pvc? just use your leftovers and some 45's and 90s to get it to the sump. use a clamp with screw down deal to stabilize it. besides a 10' stick is 1.00 and some change!

[daivan]

hello all,
i'm a newbie from indonesia

i'm done workin my overflow using 1" pipe. and its works (altough i have to suck the water for the first time ). but its fine now. thanks for the great idea.

sorry for my bad english, hope you all understand what i mean...

c ya

[phorn]

Cool! Looks good! I'm new here to, so from another newb - Welcome!

[StackTrayce]

So, I had my overflow working fine when I had my old meager PH based sump return. Now I've upgraded the pump to a 250gph model (idunno flow at 4' ft head, not too much I would suspect) and the overflow can't keep up. I did mine with 3/4" PVC before and even tried removing my strainer and playing with drain line to improve flow, but no luck. Note that return from sump is 3/4" PVC. I am planning to go out and buy components to rebuild this from 1.5" PVC and probably also make a lower PVC guard out of 4" pvc or something.
Any thoughts or advice?