Jacob’s Blog

The purpose of this calculator is to determine how your existing and/or future aquarium will impact your energy bill. This calculator is designed to work for PG&E customers or anyone on a tiered plan similar to what PG&E uses. This will work for anyone on a fixed rate plan as well you’ll just have to cheat and enter some large number (1000 for example) for your daily baseline and your fixed rate as your baseline rate.

Disclaimer: This application is designed for novel use only. By using this application you and you alone assume full responsibility for the use of the data generated herein. Ok enjoy!

PG&E makes it incredibly complicated to understand your energy bill with their tiered rate system. A couple of things this calculator makes more clear are: 1) It’s not really possible to know how much your aquarium related energy use costs without taking into consideration your ‘other’ non-aquarium energy use. 2) the less ‘other’ energy you use around the house the less your tank costs to run.

Project 360 has found new life these holidays :) I’m making a push to get the plumbing, air exchange, stand, and canopy complete before Christmas. Everything has been on hold for so long I needed to go back and refresh myself with my own designs. This included checking my sump design, so I decided to throw this together…

The tool below will help you determine how much the water level in your sump will increase when the power is off. There are some notes on use below. DISCLAIMER - Use at your own risk! I’m not responsible for any losses you may suffer from use of this information.

Notes:

1. 1) Since return lines are below the surface they will cause a siphon when power is lost. A typical solution is to drill a small (1/16 to 1/8 inch) hole in each return line somewhere below the water surface to act as a siphon break. For instance, if the hole is drilled 1 inch below the water surface, then the water level will drop 1 inch then the hole will be exposed to air and the siphon will stop.
2. 2) The volume of water in the piping between sump and tank is most likely less than 1 gallon. For reference the following are gallons per 100 feet: 3/4″=2.8g, 1″=4.5g, 1 1/2″=10g, 2″=17g
3. 3) The sump operating water level is determined by the height of baffles in the sump and by how high above the baffles the water is filled to (by you). Running at the maximum sump water level is not recommended. Allow for as much ‘head space’ as possible to deal with the unexpected.

This is a side-track from the usual “Project 360″ post. I just wanted to share a little about a spreadsheet that I developed for modeling a piping system and determining the optimum pump to use. This is a very useful tool for designing a new process line and understanding the system curve (flow vs. pressure drop in the system). The program is driven by Excel and custom written Visual Basic routines. The limitations of this system are:

- Calculations are for Newtonian Fluids only (in a nutshell a fluid who’s viscosity is independent of shear forces)
- Pump suggestions are limited to those in the database of the program (which can be expanded upon as time allows)

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