The sound of Silence ?

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So, now the tank is full of water, the Bean overflow is happily in place, and the only (tiny) leak actually drips into the sump anyway. I'll fix it, but it's not crucial right now.

The Warner Marine K2 skimmer is plugged in and switched on, it's actually producing far too many bubbles at the moment, even with the gate valve completely open (!). I've left it to overflow back into the sump, and I hope this is because the thing is squeaky clean and needs to bed in for a little while. It's a bit noisy, too. Hopefully that'll disappear as it starts to slime up a bit...

The overflow is silent, blessedly silent. The skimmer is a bit noisy, but the main noise is coming from the Reeflo Dart pump. There are a few reasons for noisy pumps given on the reeflo site, one of which is running them in for 48 hours. Well, we'll see :) It's not *hugely* noisy, but it is annoying...

Any insight on any of this greatly appreciated :)

[update: 19/10/2011]

So yesterday I got in touch with Reeflo by email. About 4 minutes after sending the email I had a reply back from them. We discussed how I'd set up the pump, what the probable causes of the noise were, and eventually I sent them a sound recording of the pump running.

I mentioned that I could hear the pump from ~50' away unless I closed doors in-between the pump and where I was standing. It was a low continuous hum (90% of the sound) with a superimposed oscillation (about 10% of the sound) on top of it.

The next reply from them was that the bearings must have slipped during shipping, asking for my shipping address / serial number etc. and they'd replace the pump with a silent one. I understand that this is how it's supposed to work, but because it so often doesn't, I can't praise Reeflo enough for their approach to business. They have a convert for life.

[update: 23/10/2011]

A box arrived from Reeflo on Friday night (21/10). It had a new pump inside, as well as a paid return-postage UPS label. I replaced the pump on Saturday, and since then we've been enjoying a much lower volume of noise. You can still hear the pump (it's not totally silent) but the decibel level must have gone down by a factor of 5 or more. It's now possible to sit at the table (right next to the tank) and have a normal conversation, without shouting :) The low-level hum is quite relaxing, actually :)

Well done Reeflo :)