TheFishGuy;3025439; said:
This is what I was trying to tell you to do.... Also wanted to mention that reducing down to a regular garden hose for water changes is not a good idea. My 1500 takes 30 minutes to drain 500 gallons out of it through 2" PVC... You're going to want to hard pipe the drain... Trust me...
I have the hose reduction set up on my 185, and I'm about ready to change it to solid 1" pipe because I'm impatient....
My 240 drains 80 gallons in like five minutes through 1" PVC... Really nice...
In that case I'm going to do a 2" pipe on the back close to the bottom. I will go straight through the wall to the yard. Behind the tank will have to be a ball valve. Will have to figure out something to carry the water into the yard away from the garage wall. Maybe a gutter drain attached to teh bottom of the garage lol. After going through my head with the closet flange idea I found what I stated before to be the only logical choice. I'll be ordering a few of those since they are so cheap. Probably four, and that way I can use them on the returns also!
That means another 2, 5" holes to drill
LFS has another marble catfish in. It's been there for two weeks now. If no one buys it by the time this is finished and I have more room for babies it will be mine!
Been researching tons on denitration. Seems like it could work well, but there's a need to find a way to either backwash the media, or come up with something to constantly agitate it and remove built up sludge! One thing that might work is comming up with a dual system where you run them alternately. When you notice one is filling with sludge turn on the second one a few weeks before you know it will fail. Then you can backwash the hell out of the first one until it's sludge free. Keeping oxygen out of the equation seems to be the big concern. I wonder if you backwash and then just set it back up if that will kill off the denitrating bacteria? If not you could have a pump just for backwashing, and once it's full of sludge backwash, and then fill normally. It would reduce down to it's oxygen free state at the same rate as normal I would think. If I were to put a system like this in place I would reduce my water changes drastically. There's so many pros, and the only cons I can come up with are making it work over a long period of time!
Although I have to admit that it could serve a dual purpose... charge people a viewing fee for the tank in the summer... and in the winter charge to rent out the ice rink in the back yard in the winter 
If not then I will just have to put up a warning sign so that the idiots that keep breaking into my garage won't fall on my property and get hurt, and then sue me!
