FarmerTy Posted September 24, 2014 Share Posted September 24, 2014 What? Somebody actually reads my thread? Lol! I was happy to report after dosing the potassium nitrate, as well as feeding a ton, as well as running my skimmer only during the day (while an air pump going at night to mitigate loss of aeration when the skimmer was off), that I was able to maintain a concentration around 4-5ppm the last couple of weeks. It dipped down slowly over the course of 4 weeks when I first dosed but at the rate it is dropping, a monthly dose of patassium nitrate may be my regiment for now. Hopefully you will have some success at maintaining your levels as well! Sent via Tapatalk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nori4dori Posted September 24, 2014 Author Share Posted September 24, 2014 lol Ty. the picture of a bottle of spectracide on your thread caught my attention! Thanks for doing all the crazy experiments so us newbies don't have to. good point about the aeration. i will hook up an air pump so i don't suffocate my corals since the skimmer is offline. did you notice any increase in algae with the increased nitrates? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FarmerTy Posted September 24, 2014 Share Posted September 24, 2014 I could see some more bits of green algae on the glass and on some of the rocks but my tangs and clean-up crew make short work of that. I feel like my massive ball of chaeto grew some too but it's hard to quantify something that big. Btw, you can totally get the Spectracide stuff at Lowe's if you didn't want to order it online. Sent via Tapatalk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nori4dori Posted October 24, 2014 Author Share Posted October 24, 2014 This is what I spent the last 4 hours of my life on: Its a 2-channel dosing pump... hooked to the computer right now for debugging, but it doesn't need to be. All I need to do is power it up with an adapter, and its in action. So far I have been dosing 2-part by hand once a day... but sometimes I am gone for the weekend, or late with my dosing, or forget if I dosed or not... and SPS don't like that. So I really needed an automatic doser. I could buy a nice 4-channel Jebao doser on eBay for $120, but I decided this was the perfect time to step into the dark side of Arduino! $50 total in parts. Now that I have a working model, I need to put everything together in a solid form, and I won't have to worry about going away for the weekend again. Its amazing what you can do with an Arduino - a $12 board the size of a credit card. Next step: add temperature, pH and ORP probes and make my own DIY controller! This will be fun. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jolt Posted October 24, 2014 Share Posted October 24, 2014 Very cool! I use a Reef Angel controller, which is based on arduino. I enjoy writing the C code and tweaking things. But you are taking it a step or two further!! You might want to lurk on their forum, there are lots of good code snippets that might be useful to you .... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MINI Posted October 24, 2014 Share Posted October 24, 2014 Will definitely be watching your progress with the Arduino. The versatility and potential is amazing, once you get the basics down. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nori4dori Posted October 27, 2014 Author Share Posted October 27, 2014 Top-down FTS 10/26/14: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jolt Posted October 27, 2014 Share Posted October 27, 2014 That's a lot of frags! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dean Posted October 27, 2014 Share Posted October 27, 2014 Tank looks great! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nano Reefer Ky Posted November 5, 2014 Share Posted November 5, 2014 Looking good! What pumps are you using for your autodoser? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nori4dori Posted November 7, 2014 Author Share Posted November 7, 2014 These are the pumps I got for my doser: http://www.ebay.com/itm/12V-DC-Dosing-pump-Peristaltic-dosing-Head-For-Aquarium-Lab-Analytical-water-DIY-/171122644515 . I am still testing out the doser; once I am confident that it does its job well, I will be putting up a DIY thread. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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