| Rotor Head |
| by Darren |
Introduction
It A few months ago I heard about using a sprinkler rotor head for a water return device in my reef tank. At first it sounded strange but the more I thought about it the better it sounded. Why spend almost $150-200 on other devices when this one would work almost the same and at a fraction
of the cost. All of my experiences have been with the Orbit VoyagerII rotor head, so far they have been going good for about 9 months now and are still going strong. The pic's aren't the best, they were taken with a Sony video net cam and a capture card, soon I'll try to take some regular pics and scan them, Still saving up for a digi cam. All questions can be sent to fishmon@freewwweb.com or I can sometimes be found on the IRC channel #reefs on Xnet as sky24 (I lurk allot so I don't say much but I'm usually there). |
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This is what my completed assembly looks like. The rotor head is inverted and glued to an acrylic plate which also becomes the bracket for mounting it to the tank . |
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This is a front view of the tank with the rotor head installed and running. I now have three rotors running in the tank. and it has greatly dropped the back pressure on my return pump. The pump I am using is a Little Giant 4md. |
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Here are the four basic parts of acrylic that get glued together to make the bracket. The center piece of acrylic has two holes drilled in it and then tapped 1/4-20 so that the bracket can be clamped to the tank wall. |
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Here the first pieces of the bracket are being glued together. |
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Here is the rotor head, the spring has been removed from the rotor body and isn't used. |
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The rotor body is them glued to the bracket along with the other two parts of the bracket. The smaller piece of acrylic is used as a brace to stiffen up the glue joint so the the screws don't bend the piece of acrylic back. |
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This is what the completed assembly looks like when done. All pluming was done with 3/4 inch on the first rotor head but was later changed to 1/2 inch as you see in the picture. That's all there is to it, it is a simple project. All acrylic gluing was with weld on 3 including gluing the sprinkler head to the acrylic.
I may consider building these for the non DIY types, Email me for info.
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