JohnM99
Premium Member
Looking around at various ideas for automated continuous (actually intermittent) feeding system ideas. Obviously, on a reef, feeding is not once a day at 5 pm when the owner happens to come home - it is more or less continuous - probably important for fish such as tangs, and especially for non photosynthetic inverts.
A few problems
- if you put the food into the sump before the main pump, it can get mashed up - I have seen some studies where they found extensive >90% destruction with a main return pump.
- Refrigeration - if you want this to need maintenance only say, once a week, you have to refrigerate many choices for food
- Dead space in tubing - if you do refrigerate, you can only use short tubing distances outside the refrigerator - since because of the very small volumes of feeding, it will spend quite a bit of time sitting in the dead space of the tube before going into the tank
- If you have a remote sump system, then you are a very long way away from the tank
After seeing quite a few ideas on the web, I put together an idea for a small system -
1. Get a very small fridge - there are lots of these now - car fridges etc - small enough for a few cans of soda - not as big as traditional small fridge
2. Use a dual peristaltic pump system - pump 1 goes on first, and delivers a small volume of the concentrated food, and then pump 2 goes on for a volume sufficient to flush the line. Pump 2 could draw its water from the sump or refugium as needed
3. The feed goes into the main return line after the return pump - this would work, since peristaltic pumps do not permit backflow, and are fine pumping into a high pressure area
What do you think? I am inherently lazy and like the idea of automating things. It has always struck me that it is weirdly unnatural to feed our little friends a big lump of food once a day. (I will try to paste the diagram below)
A few problems
- if you put the food into the sump before the main pump, it can get mashed up - I have seen some studies where they found extensive >90% destruction with a main return pump.
- Refrigeration - if you want this to need maintenance only say, once a week, you have to refrigerate many choices for food
- Dead space in tubing - if you do refrigerate, you can only use short tubing distances outside the refrigerator - since because of the very small volumes of feeding, it will spend quite a bit of time sitting in the dead space of the tube before going into the tank
- If you have a remote sump system, then you are a very long way away from the tank
After seeing quite a few ideas on the web, I put together an idea for a small system -
1. Get a very small fridge - there are lots of these now - car fridges etc - small enough for a few cans of soda - not as big as traditional small fridge
2. Use a dual peristaltic pump system - pump 1 goes on first, and delivers a small volume of the concentrated food, and then pump 2 goes on for a volume sufficient to flush the line. Pump 2 could draw its water from the sump or refugium as needed
3. The feed goes into the main return line after the return pump - this would work, since peristaltic pumps do not permit backflow, and are fine pumping into a high pressure area
What do you think? I am inherently lazy and like the idea of automating things. It has always struck me that it is weirdly unnatural to feed our little friends a big lump of food once a day. (I will try to paste the diagram below)