In my continued quest for the maintenance free aquarium I heard of undergravel jets being used to keep the gravel clean and eliminating, or nearly so, the need to vacuum the gravel. After working out the design in my head I realized I had the concept all wrong for UGJ and that I was actually thinking on a RF-UGF 
<---- me on every project I do.
I started working on it Saturday night but over heated my dremel so It's only half done. I figured I'd post some pic's now in case there are mortal flaws in my design it wont be too late to fix.
However this turns out, it would have been 100x better if I did it when the tank was being setup. I'm going to drain the tank and remove the gravel but the background is siliconed in, so I'll be working around it.
I run a wet/dry but wasn't getting the mechinical filtration I wanted so I picked up an FX5 on sale. The plan for now is to use the fx5 outflow to push the water through the gravel. I'll be doing test runs in the bathtub to see what kind of pressure I get from it. Because of the cross braces and low space above the tank I have to build two filters. I'm thinking this will be good since I'll only have to pump water across half the tank on each filter. I'm hoping that will keep the pressure up. If the fx5 doesn't cut it for both sides I'll add a pump to one side and just have the fx5 power one. Worse case, I leave the fx5 out of the loop all together but that would require a larger pump and I don't want to fork over the money or have the extra heat. If I go that route I'll probably bring the fx5 returns to the bottom of the tank to act like a poorman ugj's.
I used plastic pegboard and latice channel to build the filter. Since the filter will be slightly smaller then the surface area on the bottom of the tank I drilled holes in the sides of the filter to provide some flow there. The bathtub trials should take place this weekend and if all goes well into the tank it goes.
<---- me on every project I do.I started working on it Saturday night but over heated my dremel so It's only half done. I figured I'd post some pic's now in case there are mortal flaws in my design it wont be too late to fix.
However this turns out, it would have been 100x better if I did it when the tank was being setup. I'm going to drain the tank and remove the gravel but the background is siliconed in, so I'll be working around it.
I run a wet/dry but wasn't getting the mechinical filtration I wanted so I picked up an FX5 on sale. The plan for now is to use the fx5 outflow to push the water through the gravel. I'll be doing test runs in the bathtub to see what kind of pressure I get from it. Because of the cross braces and low space above the tank I have to build two filters. I'm thinking this will be good since I'll only have to pump water across half the tank on each filter. I'm hoping that will keep the pressure up. If the fx5 doesn't cut it for both sides I'll add a pump to one side and just have the fx5 power one. Worse case, I leave the fx5 out of the loop all together but that would require a larger pump and I don't want to fork over the money or have the extra heat. If I go that route I'll probably bring the fx5 returns to the bottom of the tank to act like a poorman ugj's.
I used plastic pegboard and latice channel to build the filter. Since the filter will be slightly smaller then the surface area on the bottom of the tank I drilled holes in the sides of the filter to provide some flow there. The bathtub trials should take place this weekend and if all goes well into the tank it goes.
