Dosing pump is awesome

R

Reefmike

I recently purchased a Drew's Doser Peristaltic Dosing Pump to dose my alk. Got it all set up and running. I luv it! Every morning since installing it (a week now) I have tested alk and it has been 10dkh. Time to get another for the calcium.
Oh, I'm running it with my ACjr. Comes on for 1 hr. in the middle of the night.
 
Cool! My plan was to try these pumps out once I got my AC3 setup and going. My AC3 was just delivered and is sitting on my front porch as I type this at work!

I'll have to wait a little while to grow the play funds back up though.

Good to hear they work well!

Can you post a pic of how you setup the pump and, as well as the alk? Did you put the tubing directly into your alk container? Is it sealed?
 
Mike, what kind of ph spike do you see when it doses? That'd be my only worry with a short dosing period like that.
 
Well, since I'm off tomorrow I will try to stay up and watch it. I haven't got the controller hooked up to my new PC yet so haven't been able to keep track.
It's got to be waaayyy less than dosing by hand every morning though. I was slowly dribbling the same amount into the overflow. I would do half, then 1/2 the calcium, the other half of the alk, and then the rest of the cal.
It would always spike pretty high right at 1st, because of where the ph probe was, but then drop back down to only a little higher than where it started. Usually only about + .1 (start at 8.0, dose, initial spike, within a min. or so back down to 8.1).
I am thinking about breaking it into two 30 min. time periods seperated by 2 or 3 hours.
 
Can you post a pic of how you setup the pump and said:
I'll try to get a pic up later. Basically, the gallon jug is sitting in the stand under my prop tank (which is plumbed into the display system). I mounted the pump just above the jug with the line going thru a hole I drilled in the cap just a teeny bit bigger than the line. The output line goes to the sump under the display right in between the display & prop tank drain pipes.
Click to expand...
 
Mike.. I'd recommend you break that up into multiple dosing periods. You have a good idea how much you get in the time you have it on now, so break it up into 10-20 doses over the 24hr period and your corals will appreciate it. It will stabilize not only the pH over the period of time, but will avoid the alk swing as well associated with it. Smaller more frequent dosing is the target when using a dosing pump, not just the automation of the act of dosing.
 
@Reefmike wrote:
Dave said:
Yep.. basic like the lights.. you just put an on/off multiple times. It adds lines of code, but you should have enough space to handle it.

You have the lines looking like this right?

If Time = nnnn Then DOS ON
If Time = nnnn Then DOS OFF

Where nnnn is your dosing start/stop time.

Just add more lines for the breakups.. so instead of 60 minutes you do multiples for 2 or 3 minutes each.

For example.. a 3 minute dose starting at 6pm

If Time = 18:00 Then DOS ON
If Time = 18:03 Then DOS OFF


Unfortunately you can't do something like 3 min every hour or something like that :) You have to program them individually. Just take your dosing time and divide.

That's what makes the LMIII so nice, it does that for you automatically, but those Drews pumps are nice and solid pumps so you can do the same thing, just with the additional code lines.

I'd break it into 6 periods to start over 24 hrs... I'm not sure how often the code recycles so getting down to a minute may or may not work right. Scott may know that though.

Each new pump you add will add lines of code so keep an eye on your limit... Scott will know that too, I don't off the top of my head but there is one so keep that in mind and adjust accordingly.

Just keep close tabs with testing for the first week or so... and as your corals grow and your requirements increase, you can add additional time or dosing periods to compensate.
Click to expand...
 
Actually there no need for all those lines.

OSC 002/058 ON/OFF Then DP1 ON

2 minutes on, 58 minutes off. (DP1 = drew pump 1 ) and do the same
for a DP2 if you get one for CA.



@DaveJ wrote:
[I]@Reefmike wrote:[/I][quote="Dave said:
Yep.. basic like the lights.. you just put an on/off multiple times. It adds lines of code, but you should have enough space to handle it.

You have the lines looking like this right?

If Time = nnnn Then DOS ON
If Time = nnnn Then DOS OFF

Where nnnn is your dosing start/stop time.

Just add more lines for the breakups.. so instead of 60 minutes you do multiples for 2 or 3 minutes each.

For example.. a 3 minute dose starting at 6pm

If Time = 18:00 Then DOS ON
If Time = 18:03 Then DOS OFF


Unfortunately you can't do something like 3 min every hour or something like that :) You have to program them individually. Just take your dosing time and divide.

That's what makes the LMIII so nice, it does that for you automatically, but those Drews pumps are nice and solid pumps so you can do the same thing, just with the additional code lines.

I'd break it into 6 periods to start over 24 hrs... I'm not sure how often the code recycles so getting down to a minute may or may not work right. Scott may know that though.

Each new pump you add will add lines of code so keep an eye on your limit... Scott will know that too, I don't off the top of my head but there is one so keep that in mind and adjust accordingly.

Just keep close tabs with testing for the first week or so... and as your corals grow and your requirements increase, you can add additional time or dosing periods to compensate."]
Click to expand...
 
@rckrzy1 wrote:
Actually there no need for all those lines. OSC 002/058 ON/OFF Then DP1 ON 2 minutes on said:
I was just reading the manual and was fixing to ask if that was the command to use.
Click to expand...
 
@Reefmike wrote:
[I]@rckrzy1 wrote:[/I][quote="Actually there no need for all those lines. OSC 002/058 ON/OFF Then DP1 ON 2 minutes on said:
I was just reading the manual and was fixing to ask if that was the command to use."]

Cool... not that familiar with the OSC command so if that works, great. Just make sure that you do the math right. ;)
Click to expand...
 
http://www.kenargo.com/software/software.htm

Get this sim and load up your program and it runs in fast time, 1 sec=1min and you can see if it does what you think it does and debugs as well.
 
Well, guess I did the math right. 2 mornings in a row tested at 10 dKH.
Also, looking thru the data log showed me no ph spike at all. That is cool! The ph did not drop as much during lights out either.

So, no measuring/pouring, no ph spike, and a smaller ph swing. Gotta luv it. :D
 
These are definitely on my list to get, once I rebuild my funds after having just bought an AC3 :). Hopefully they'll re-stock pretty quickly!
 
Going by the ACjr's data log which logs once every hour (default setting), it shows a slow decline overnight down to 8.19 then a slow rise during the day back up to around 8.40. I did just set the log to track every 30 min. to see what I get.

It's probably pretty negligible though. In the 3 min. the doser is on each hour it's only adding ~4.5 ml to ~100 - 105g total system volume.
 
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