Boy, did I screw up today.

[Murfman]

How did it turn out, Andy? I put a piece of masking tape on the doggie door to remind me when I am making water. Too many floods!

[thejrc]

Speaking of salt andy, Mike left me a message yesterday, seems he found the bio assay at a pretty good deal, bout $45 a box if we pick up a 40 box pallet...

I'm still pondering it but if I decide to give it a shot you wanna go in for a few?

[Ummfish]

We're still hanging in there. Water was at 1.024 this morning. I'm still seeing a few issues that might be related to the quick temp drop and rebound or quick salinity drop and rebound or both, but things are stabilizing again.

Joe: I wouldn't mind going in for a couple, but I still have some of the natural salt water to use for invert culture and have never needed it yet. But yeah, I'll take a couple if you order them.

[stugray]

Ummfish,

"Wandered away from my tank while it was topping up. Lowered the salinity to 1.018 and the temp to about 74. Ugh."

Now that you have "mostly recovered" can you tell us how this happened exactly?

Do you do manual top-off?

Just curious if there is anything I can do to help.
I have a PLC control the fill on my RO/DI res. & simple gravity feed to a float valve for my ATO.

If you need any help with ATO I would gladly pitch in.

You can easily reproduce what I have for ~$200 and it scales to any size system.
The PLC also drives my variable speed CL so it is dual purpose ;-)

Stu

[Zooid]

What kind of PLC do you use?

[Ummfish]

I do manual topoffs. I have an ATO that was hooked to a pump on a reservoir, but there was too much water movement in the sump and it wound up burning out the pump. I think I've solved the water movement issue, but I haven't gotten a new pump yet. So, I have been doing manual topoffs for a while. Honestly, I don't particularly mind doing them manually, as long as I don't screw things up. But this time I did my morning routine out of the order I usually do it and just walked away from running water from the Kold Ster-il unit.

I'm not really sure what a PLC is, but I'm interested to hear more. I do have an ATO unit that I can use. I also have a peristaltic pump that's not doing anything. I need to find instructions for that, though, because its interface is not very intuitive.

[Zooid]

A PLC is a programmable logic controller. Most people in the hobby use a dedicated unit like AquaControllers or similar.
I use PLC's in my work at an industrial plant so I know how to program them and I have one at home that sooner or later I'll try using on my setup. The good thing about PLC's is that I can have many many more outputs and inputs than an aquacontroller. It's probably not necessary but sometimes it could come in handy.

[stugray]

Ummfish,

I prefer to go for simple. My ATO is just a RO/DI reservoir 1 floor up from my Sump.
Top off is from just a float valve via gravity feed.
The same tank feeds my Kalk reactor & it is just gravity feed as well.

( If gravity screws up, we have bigger problems than our tanks ;-)


Zooid,

I have an old-school Square-D Micro-1. You cant get much simpler than that & you can still find them on ebay for ~$100.

Stu

[wicked demon]

I was gonna say somthing about gravity but stu beat me to it, and was funnier than I was gonna be!!

[Ummfish]

Sorry I've been absent. It's been a pretty hard week around here with a puppy in ICU. He fortunately came home today, but there were a couple of days where he sure didn't look like he was going to make it.

Stu--What you say makes sense. I don't have anywhere upstairs to put a reservoir, though. Hmm. I'll think about it.