LobsterOfJustice
Recovering Detritophobe
Hi everyone,
I would like to have some discussion on automated continuous feeding methods. I guess these mainly fall in to two categories, live foods and nonliving foods.
I first thought about ways to feed frozen foods throughout they day. I imagined something silimar to a kalk stirrer which would come on to stir up the food, and then a pump would come on to flush a portion of the food into the tank. This entire unit could be sat in a mini fridge and new cubes of frozen food could be added every morning.
I then thought automated living cultures might be even lower maintenance. I started with the idea of a rotifer culture which was would be auto dosed into the tank throughout the day. Then got the idea of hooking up a phyto culture inline before this - so a pump comes on and adds a certain amount of rotifers in the tank, then another pump comes on to replace the lost volume in the rotifer culture with phyto. Then, the water in the phyto culture could be replaced with another pump feeding from a fresh container of saltwater, or, even better, the phyto culture could be fed with water from the aquarium which has been run through a UV sterilizer. This could result in an automated way to add plankton to the tank as well as recycling the nutrients in the aquarium back into the food (essentually a plankton refugium). It seems like a pretty simple concept. I have seen setups for culturing and dosing live foods before but they seemed more complicated. If you already have a controller, pumps are less than $100 so if this system would work it could be set up relatively cheaply (couple hundred bucks) and would be essentially completely automated. Am I missing something?
Who else is using some form of automated continuous feeding? What other methods are there?
I would like to have some discussion on automated continuous feeding methods. I guess these mainly fall in to two categories, live foods and nonliving foods.
I first thought about ways to feed frozen foods throughout they day. I imagined something silimar to a kalk stirrer which would come on to stir up the food, and then a pump would come on to flush a portion of the food into the tank. This entire unit could be sat in a mini fridge and new cubes of frozen food could be added every morning.
I then thought automated living cultures might be even lower maintenance. I started with the idea of a rotifer culture which was would be auto dosed into the tank throughout the day. Then got the idea of hooking up a phyto culture inline before this - so a pump comes on and adds a certain amount of rotifers in the tank, then another pump comes on to replace the lost volume in the rotifer culture with phyto. Then, the water in the phyto culture could be replaced with another pump feeding from a fresh container of saltwater, or, even better, the phyto culture could be fed with water from the aquarium which has been run through a UV sterilizer. This could result in an automated way to add plankton to the tank as well as recycling the nutrients in the aquarium back into the food (essentually a plankton refugium). It seems like a pretty simple concept. I have seen setups for culturing and dosing live foods before but they seemed more complicated. If you already have a controller, pumps are less than $100 so if this system would work it could be set up relatively cheaply (couple hundred bucks) and would be essentially completely automated. Am I missing something?
Who else is using some form of automated continuous feeding? What other methods are there?
, I have a feeding system with phyto and zoo which is very close to what you described. on my small tank (50g) I have an aluminum container filled with frozen foods, cyclop-eeze, spirulina, phyto and zoo+ vitamis and aminos. A pump sits inside the mixture, connected to a tube that goes out of the container and splits into a Y. An electric shut-off valve controles where the food will go: back to the container to stirr the food or to the tank to feed the fish, corals etc. The whole thing is cooled by a 120w thermo electric cooler.
