Hello all, I am planning out my first setup and grow. I plan on having 1 inch feed lines and 2 inch return lines to the mother tote. I figure I will have about 50 gallons in the system. What size water pump should I use? I originally planned doing half inch feeds and 1 inch returns with a 400 gph pump so I'm thinking I should get at least an 800gph or a 1000gph. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
I used an 800gph on my DIY under current with 2in PVC for the return and 1/2in for the feed with no issues. Depending on how many buckets you have would determine the power of the pump you should have. I had 4 buckets and 1 controller. The water was really circulating in my system. Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum
Under Current sizes their pumps for an exchange of the total module volume 6x/hour. My system is 56 gallons x 6 = 336 gallons per hour. They sized it at 350 gallons per hour.
And you want your return to be smaller than the feeds or else your pump will be delivering more water than it can receive - which will be an overflow. My system has 2" feed lines between all modules and a 3/4" return line.
So I think we might be calling the return and feed lines differently. When I say feed line, I mean the line coming from the pump/reservoir going to the buckets and the return line I mean the gravity flow from the buckets back to the reservoir. If it were a bigger line going to the buckets and smaller going to the reservoir then the buckets would over flow.....right? Or am I thinking about it backwards? Thanks.
No, we're on the same page. The pump will be pulling from the bottom of the far end buckets, right? It pulls from the far end and dumps it back at the top of the rez. Between the control bucket and all the other bucket, since it's open to the air, it's gravity refilling the buckets. You can't put fluid into the control rez faster than gravity takes to replace it on the other side. So, 2" from the control rez to each module, and a 3/4" line pulling from the far end going back to the rez. If it were the other way, you'd be flooding the control rez with 2" of flow and taking out 3/4. You definitely want it the other way. You want that path for gravity to be wide open. The other thing - with 3/4" at the modules, those will plug with roots and cause overflows too. You want to have more than enough pipe connecting all the modules so that flow can happen unobstructed.
I see, I had it planned a different way but now that I see the blueprint this looks like it would work better anyway. I planned on having the last 2 buckets dead end and the pump going to each bucket, guess i should have known better when i got the design from youtube. Thanks for the help. I can't wait to get started!