A Friendly Reminder to Clean Your Sump Pump

Let’s face it, for most of us, cleaning your aquarium sump pump is a real pain. Unless you have a glorious filter room, chances are your significant other can share a story of you submerged in your aquarium stand swearing your head off. The real crazed ones probably involve your sump pump. Sump pumps often take a back seat in your sump behind your protein skimmer or refugium. Personally I have to take off my skimmer cup and my fuge light just to look at it. So recently I noticed low flow and bit the bullet. Take a look at what I found. Yikes. This is a friendly reminder to clean your sump pump.




How Often Do I Clean My Sump Pump?

I have a ball-valve reducing flow on my sump pump by about 25%. When I find myself loosening the ball-valve all the way to get my desired pump output, I know it’s time to clean the pump. This is about every 2 months. It would benefit from monthly cleaning, but as stated, this is a pain and I put it off like everyone else. But as soon as the ball-valve is wide open and I am not getting desired flow, I clean it.

Sponge

I keep a sponge in my sump pump. This certainly requires me to clean it, maybe more often than if I did not use a sponge. I’m not sure. Probably. But it certainly makes cleaning the pump impeller easier and prevents jamming and excessive noise and wear. I have to do little more than wipe the impeller off. But it is a trade off.

Quick Disconnects and Plastic Hose Clamps

I use a plastic hose clamp to secure the hose to the sump pump. While easy to remove, I do need to use channel grip pliers to attach it securely. The real time-consuming part is wrestling with the hose and the barbed fitting when removing and re-attaching. Some day I want to use quick disconnect fittings like I used to have with my old Eheim canister filter. I could accomplish this by cutting a short piece of my return hose and leaving that attached to the barbed fitting on my sump pump and attaching the quick disconnect to it and the remaining end of my return hose. This would really save time with maintenance.

When Removing the Sump Pump - Note the Time

I just learned this lesson firsthand. Note the time when you start removing your sump pump. I coupled a water change along with this sump pump cleaning and in hindsight, that was not ideal. At the very least, I should have cleaned the pump - leaving the water in the display tank - before I began the water change. I removed the water first from the display tank. This exposed a lot of SPS coral to the air and direct light. In my experience this is not a big deal - they can handle it - if I fill up my aquarium soon after removing the water. However, when I added another 30 minutes fussing with my sump pump to the procedure, I harmed my SPS. 2 days later I am seeing some recovering but there are still branches of my Bird’s Nest, Stylo and an acropora that are bleached out a bit. Oops. I hope I don’t need to prune soon. That was not wise. I should have left water in the display and started with the water change after cleaning the pump. Lesson learned.

Lastly, a garden hose in the backyard with a nice jet nozzle can save you time and spare a lot of paper towels when cleaning your sump pump.

Here is my pump, after the pressure wash in the backyard:





I hope these sump pump cleaning tips help somebody out and save a few coral. If you have a good technique, please share.

matt

 

Always good to get a reminder to do our chores! All the stuff we never want to do and feel as if we can put off until something breaks or our params get all out of whack.

 

Worse than mom. ;D

 

Thanks for the tip matt. I clean my mag 12 every couple weeks during a water change but my external pump I put off as I have to drain the sump. I have a garden hose with a jet nozzle and here I've been cursing while at the sink. Geez, I can't believe I didn't think of that. Lol

 

Just so you know Matt.I ran that pump for 12 years with no sponge.Still had the original impeller when it finally died.

 

I was thinking the same thing the other day.

That's good to know Vinny.
Eheim's are bricks.

 

I always take the sponge out of my pumps so they cant get clogged.

 

Aye. I get the feeling most run without.
If I recall correctly, I think I debated it at setup but got really paranoid when I was running caulerpa in my refugium at the time. I didn't want it getting back in the display tank. (Ironically I managed to do that when I shut that external refugium down somehow.)Regardless, now that I use chaeto, I may reconsider.

 

Another spongless Eheim user here.

 

I was just thinking I needed to do this to my returns as well - Ill put it on the list for this weekend.