Pastey's 200DD

I have a 5g that I fill daily. Yeah.. a pain.. but at least that way, for me, if it got stuck it would only add 5 gal.

But I have an alarm that goes off if the ATO runs too long, it is also my out of water warning. LOL
 
My ATO has an alarm too....one that my wife has come to hate. She says it reminds her of a heart monitor so she's always saying my tank is on life support. The worst is when I think that the top off supply will last til morning and, instead, the alarm goes off at 3am. I'm going to buy a 20g brute bin so I can mix up 20g of kalk ATO remotely. This way, I can leave the sediment/residue behind and transfer only clean solution.
 
i feel your pain, i have the smart ATO and i swear it seems like my tank evaporates all it's water between 1am and 4am...
 
I'll 3rd that...I, too, have the Smart ATO and that thing wakes me up all the freaking time. I zombie mode myself to my tank and unplug it and just deal with it in the morning. No way I'm going in the garage and mixing kalk at some god-awful hour of night.
 
I fill my ato before I go to bed. Normally turning it on when I get in shower then off right as I am headed to bed. OTHERWISE that annoying sound in middle of night. My Alarm is set to Minuet and the warning is set to Positive Bee.
 
ATO got delayed by bad weather but is due to arrive this afternoon. Just in time for me to go out of town for the weekend!
 
ATO arrived yesterday.....at my neighbors door. I had to walk over and "steal" it back 007 style to avoid the fuzz.
Shoe for reference.


Looks much better than that bucket I had been using...




Cat being a cat.
 
Ok so I'm attempting to build a manifold for a reactor or reactors. Problem is the limited amount of room for the plumbing and reactors themselves. My idea is to run the plumbing along the bottom and then run it up to the reactor inlets while running to outlet to the skimmer section of the sump. I put a 45 and a 90 on the manifold ball valve to give you an idea of how it might work.

45



90


So I'm open to ideas....
 
Finally got around to harvesting a large chunk of my my chaeto and this is what I took out...roughly half and packed as dense as possible. It was flowing out of the pan before I squished it all together.
 
Ok so I'm attempting to build a manifold for a reactor or reactors. Problem is the limited amount of room for the plumbing and reactors themselves. My idea is to run the plumbing along the bottom and then run it up to the reactor inlets while running to outlet to the skimmer section of the sump. I put a 45 and a 90 on the manifold ball valve to give you an idea of how it might work.

45



90


So I'm open to ideas....

either one should work since you will probably just reduce down to 1/2" or 3/8" tubing
 
Wow. What are you feeding that thing?

Newborn babies and small kittens. That stuff took up every inch of available space in the refugium section of my Ruby Elite sump. I'm not sure what the volume is but I'd say it was 2-3 basketball sized chunks worth in there.
 
Sonic, I'm looking to go with one or two Vertex 1.5L reactors. The inlet/outlet are both 1/2" so I would probably do a a 45 down to clear that rear upright, a 90 to the right then when it comes time for the individual reactor outlets, I don't really know if I'll have enough room to do (2)45 elbows to get the piping up the reactor inlet or if I'll have to use (2)90s. That's difficult to determine for me without the reactor here to work with. I plan on using gate valves for 2 reasons...one, because they're shorter and take up less lateral pipe space and because they're good for fine tuning flow. I guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and get one and then just pipe it to make it work. I'm terrible with theoretical stuff...I work much better hands on.
 
Just a word of warning on the Vertex reactors: fine units though they are, the inlet/outlet pipes on top are hard-fixed in a straight line, i.e. you cannot do anything with multiple units but set them up in a straight line. No easy way of access from any other angle. If that fits in with your space limitations it may be a non-issue.

Dave.M
 
Just a word of warning on the Vertex reactors: fine units though they are, the inlet/outlet pipes on top are hard-fixed in a straight line, i.e. you cannot do anything with multiple units but set them up in a straight line. No easy way of access from any other angle. If that fits in with your space limitations it may be a non-issue.

Dave.M

Yea I've noticed and that's OK since the source piping and outlet piping will be in a straight line already.

And thanks for the kind words. It's got plenty of room for improvement so we'll call it a work in progress :)
 
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