7096 improvements requested

[jbfloor]

I have been using the Tunze 7096 controller with two 6095 pumps for a week now and noticed that the unit could be made to be a lot more flexible with just a couple of minor tweaks to the firmware.

Here is my setup:

The green arrows indicate the two 6095 pumps at opposite ends of the tank. My goal is to recreate the rolling waves in a shallow reef, reversing the water flow every 5-10 seconds or so. As far as I can tell this is not possible with the 7096, which is very disappointing.

Here are the problems:

1) Pulse mode & night mode are incompatible:

This would be the normal way to set up the type of flow I am trying to achieve. However, night-mode was developed to always fall back to 'power 1' for both units, which means that pump 2 will run at 70% all night. This makes the night mode useless. It would be so much better if night mode either always takes the lower of the two power modes, in this case 30% for both pumps, or if you, as a user, can set the power level for night mode separately.

2) Interval mode is too slow

Trying to be clever, I tried to use interval mode instead. Unfortunately, again the unnecessary inflexibility of the unit stood in my way. The above settings allow for night-mode to function normally, but only allows one minute between switches. If interval time could only be in seconds, this all would have been solved.

3) Wavecontroller is start/stop
I tried the wavecontroller, but it seems to be an all-or-nothing mode. Also, it maxes out at 2.5 seconds, which is too short. If I could use the power levels for socket 3 and 4 and the wave length would not have been limited, I could have achieved my goal.. Alas, again I am thwarted by artificial limits.

None of these changes require real changes to the UI or major rewrites of the firmware. The 7096 would be so much better if some of these restrictions were removed and the user was allowed to be creative.

Finally, a question: What does 'ramp' mean? I understand it ramps the pump up or down, but what is the difference between setting it to 0.1 and 2.4 (the max in pulse mode). If using 2.4, does it mean it will take 2.4 seconds to ramp up?

PS. I am an embedded software engineer, so you can get as technical as you want in your answers. Thanks.

 

[rvitko]

While I can see the limitations you mention, I am not sure that these need to be solved or solving them provides any real benefit. The idea behind night mode is to calm things a little, i.e. stop the pulsing, in fact I generally try to set my night mode flow to be higher to avoid the night time pH drop. The ocean doesn't stall or grind to a halt, it is just slightly calmer and stopping pulsing alone does this.

Interval is not meant to be fast, hours is actually the ideal. Dr Ron Shimek released a study some years ago that showed polyps deploy into a current to catch food and currents prevail for sometime except during storms which are not the norm. Corals cannot feed properly if the direction of the current is so rapidly changed. In nature the flow has a prevailing direction for hours or days as influenced by currents and the tides, it is not excessively chaotic in most reef zones.

All of these functions are designed to replicate a natural phenomena, Interval is designed to replicate tidal changes after hours, sure, we add some "toys" with the minutes option but it is most realistic at a 6 hr change.

Wavemode is designed to create a true resonance wave, the timing is very precise and that is its only function, to create an actual wave, one exact timing will create that wave for a given tank, the low end of .30 seconds is suitable for a roughly 30" tank and the high end of 2.50 seconds is for a roughly 14ft tank.

It doesn't do everything one could ask, but it does most everything that would exist in nature, a calmer night flow, a wave, pulse mode replicates the crashing effect of waves and broadens the flow due to the slow/fast flow collision, interval replicates tides and storm mode creates a weekly storm to stir things up. Getting to far beyond that is just adding toys with no real purpose, some changes are possible but the 7096 has a relatively small onboard memory and this does also limit some of what can be done.