victoly

since it sounds like you want to be able to dim, go with the full apex. if you go with the lite (or jr, cant remember, whatever the mid range is), you have to buy an addon to control dimming. if you want to control ATO or add other switches (water on the floor is the most useful), you need a breakout box. neptune makes one, but many just have them made by someone enterprising with soldering skills (bio3 I'm looking at you!). finally, you'll need a wireless gaming adapter and pH/Temp probes if they're not included with the package you're buying.

THAT is some high quality programming

Expensive, no doubt. But how much would you estimate your livestock is worth? If it's worth more than the apex, i sleep better knowing that an engineer has put an apex through it's paces. No knock on Capt. Obvious, but making a bullet proof controller is no easy task, and there are all kinds of gremlins lurking around that have the propensity to make things go very wrong. It's all about risk tolerance.

That makes sense. Thanks! How does it notify you? An email or something? And the tank isn't near a place to connect it to the internet. Are there other options? I have mine set up for text messages, but you can do text messages or emails. If you get the unit display, it can also sound an alarm. You can set up a wireless gaming adapter (maybe $25-50) to connect it wirelessly.

You can see if it's "stuck" on, or it can notify you if it's been running too long (ie your ATO is empty, overflowing, etc).

So i did a little testing on some of our LFS (credit to George Monnat Jr for picking up samples). Both sources were adequate IMO, but RCA had undetectable total chlorine in two separate samples. Fishy Business had 0.03/0.05 ppm of total chlorine (includes chlorine/chloramines), which is about what I've been getting out of my standard RODI system, even with pentek chloramine buster. Apparently I didn't get the memo that there is a critical portion of the chloramine removal process. BRS sells "catalytic carbon" which you put in front of the pentek chlorine filter. This catalytic carbon takes the place of your 5u carbon filter and is a refillable BRS container. I get my shipment in on friday and I'll let y'all know how it goes.

bemp

My ATO has nothing to do with salinity, directly and normally. Pickling lime adds KH and Ca but adds zero to salinity, so my ATO functions exactly the same, salinity-wise, as you described for yours. I'm currently lowering salinity manually by using bins to pull SW from my sump. Then when the ATO fills it back up with RODI, the salinity goes down. That's because I added too much salt previously due to the crappy conductivity meters - not due to the ATO. The ATO is working perfectly like it should be. I dont think it was photodude's intended path of logic, but there is some evidence to suggest that elements of the pickling lime *may* be affecting your salinity reading. Emphasis on reading. Remember that salinity is a conversion of another parameter that the probe is actually testing for called specific conductivity. Ionic calcium, calcium carbonate and bicarbonate DO affect the specific conductivity. I haven't experimentally verified this, if your apex still has data log, and youre using a breakout box for ATO, you would be able to see a correlation between when your ATO is on and a change in conductivity. Just something to ponder For about 8-10 months my ATO was replacing evaporation with RODI and pickling lime with no noticeable change in salinity. That was verified through 1-2 times a month having RCA test my water to verify my readings in addition to a conductivity meter and several hydrometers. Everything was fine until last December when Jake at RCA noticed my salinity had gone really high, which was when my PINPOINT Salinity Monitor stopped being accurate (reading low causing me to add super-saturated SW). Yes, limewater has conductive ions, "saturated limewater usually has a conductivity of about 10.3 mS/cm," but those ions are "wasted" by CO2 (insoluble calcium carbonate) or are used in the system as KH & Ca without any real effect on overall system conductivity. Unless I guess they plate out on the conductivity probe's electrodes which is a possibility. Here's more detail: The Degradation of Limewater in Air All about kalkwasser So at 10.5 mS/cm (or 10,500 uS/cm) @ 25 C, you get something like 5 ppt of salinity at 1 atm http://www.fivecreeks.org/monitor/sal.shtml You're right though, alot of that is consumed and reacts with CO2 pretty quickly, and it may not have had an enormous effect on your salinity, but it's just something people should be aware of, and why to second guess every measurement you take/.

My ATO has nothing to do with salinity, directly and normally. Pickling lime adds KH and Ca but adds zero to salinity, so my ATO functions exactly the same, salinity-wise, as you described for yours. I'm currently lowering salinity manually by using bins to pull SW from my sump. Then when the ATO fills it back up with RODI, the salinity goes down. That's because I added too much salt previously due to the crappy conductivity meters - not due to the ATO. The ATO is working perfectly like it should be. I dont think it was photodude's intended path of logic, but there is some evidence to suggest that elements of the pickling lime *may* be affecting your salinity reading. Emphasis on reading. Remember that salinity is a conversion of another parameter that the probe is actually testing for called specific conductivity. Ionic calcium, calcium carbonate and bicarbonate DO affect the specific conductivity. I haven't experimentally verified this, if your apex still has data log, and youre using a breakout box for ATO, you would be able to see a correlation between when your ATO is on and a change in conductivity. Just something to ponder

SKIMMER? SKIMMERS ARE FOR THE BEES! IVE BEEN RUNNING A SKIMMERLESS TANK FOR LITERALLY HOURS.

****, that is sweet.

I go by a) time (mechanical quarterly, carbon semiannually, DI annually, RO every two years), b) quantity (just estimated) and c) filter color on the prefilter and DI resin. I'm switching up my carbon styles here to deal with chloramines, I'll keep everyone updated.

Can we see your sump?

You would.

Just a minor comment on this, I don't know how frequently the apex polls it's pH probe, but a 5 second defer may not be enough time to catch a blip reading. You might consider extending that out to more like a minute or two.

kinda rolls off the tongue. fwafsokoff, like a russian spy.

new abbreviation, FWAFSOKOF (free with a frag so only kind of free).

smash with mallet?

another thing you can check, is if you go to the comprehensive neptune manual on p14, there's a pretty good section on troubleshooting probes. One that might be helpful in your case is: 6. Take advantage of the ‘Defer’ command on your probe statements to eliminate brief value swings (doesn’t solve the interference problem but does minimize its symptoms) I find this to be particularly helpful for both ATO if you're doing it via floats and a breakout box or for anything temperature related (heaters, chillers, etc). If your temp probe freaks out, and it spits out a random high/low value, you don't want to activate some logic based off of an anomolous reading. The defer statement (Defer for X amount of time) makes it such that a given value has to be true for a set period of time before an action will be taken.

tase him.

hah, it's actually not too bad. I just did RichardL's on saturday. Pretty painless. I can walk you through it if you get stuck or want to murder someone have a good cry in your pillow.

It would fix a lot of things if you could calibrate from your friggin phone without having to walk back and forth to a computer.

I can tell you the overarching problem here is that in general, salinity/conductivity probes SUCK. I would strongly advise that you don't use any decision based logic off of your conductivity probes. I see this professionally, regularly. For reference, when I'm using my conductivity probes, i calibrate them every. single. day. and they still give me issues. These are not the dinky (no offense apex) probes that are neptune compatible, these are parts of a piece of machinery worth thousands of dollars. It sucks that you're having problems, and I want to help you work through them, but the first thing you should do is to shut off your SpC probe, and rely solely on your refractometer until we can get you straight.

was just curious to see how this turned out. I think a weekly thread is a good thing!

And all for sale fs threads, really...