Pump overkill

[Master Ninja]

How bad is it to have a pump that's way stronger than your loop can support? I have some Hydor L30s laying around waiting to be fixed, and using one of them would be much cheaper than buying another less-powerful pump. But I'm hoping to fit them with 1/4" compression fittings and use that size tubing, and dropping from 1/2" to 1/4" seems like a large difference. Would there be any kind of performance hit, or will it just not make a difference above a certain number of GPH?

 

[Cathar]

All explored in depth here:

http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/showthread.php?t=10825

 

[wtiger]

It would seem based on those numbers that there's no such thing as having a pump that's "too powerful", but instead what matters is how many watts it puts into the water with a given head and flow. Within limits of course.

 

[Top Nurse]

Way too much in-depth for me. Made my head hurt just looking at all those graphs.

I'll settle for my Aqua Computer setup. The Aquastream has the capability with my Aquaero to adjust the flow rate to about the equivalency of an Eheim 1048 more or less. But if Iwas going to use a G4 or G5 block then I would definitely use a different pump. I can see that you really have to match things up according to what you want, how much you got, and what you value correct?

 

[weapon--]

I wouldn't worry about it too much -- I normally use an original version of the RLQO which moves about 1140 gph at 0' of head and is rated to move around 714 gph through 1" tubing at six feet (IIRC). The RLQO has an isolated wet rotor which was designed to keep it from dumping heat into the water but even if you have some heat dump from the pump, you can get rid of it by using a larger heat exchanger that can handle the extra heat from the pump.