Seeking advice on ATO

Yr. friendly mod here: you cannot sollicit to buy in a regular forum and you are not yet long enough a member (90 days) to see or make use of the sales forums. Since you have gotten some helpful advice here, I have not issued a formal warning or deleted your thread. I just changed the title. The advice is good. I'll add my own: the Avast is great unless you have rowdy pets or toddlers that could knock the thing askew. But it is what I use, as less expensive and very efficient. You want your topoff hose to be about 1/4 inch, and you can jury-rig various reducers to come down from, say, a small Eheim pump, which makes a good topoff pump.
 
+1 on the Tunze Osmolator. Mine has been running 2 months without fail. It will get its first test starting tomorrow when I leave town for a week. A 20 gallon reservoir full of RO/DI and the ATO. I am very confident in it.
 
I'm one of the non-tunze folks. I just use a gravity fed ato with a float valve. Simple and has worked well for me.
 
I got the Tunze osmolator, as well. Sure, it is expensive. But compare the cost of the Tunze to the cost of what you would be spending on another ATO. How much more will the Tunze cost? $100? Maybe even $150? To me, that number is nothing compared to the extra security that comes with the dual checks (float and visual shutoffs) and the quality of Tunze. I have so many checks in place to prevent flooding the floor of our new house (and prevent my wife killing me), the ATO seemed like a no brainer for me.
 
I run the hydor ATO on a few systems and never had issues. I like that it's a temp sensor system so there are no moving parts. Is also one of the cheapest Ato's and don't have to worry about float switches getting stuck. Can usually be bought for $55-70 on Amazon.


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I have a home made one with dual floats and a 12v power supply and dual throw relay that I built for about $15 and I also have a Hydor smart level. Both work great. My display tank though? I run my home made. It at least has a mechanical failsafe. The Hydor has no such thing. I run the Hydor on my frag tank in the basement where it doesn't matter if it floods.
 
The osmolator is not as fail proof as you guys think.

Not that it's not a good product or anything, but optical switches have their problems and plenty of people have had their fair share of issues out of the unit.

Tunze stands by their equipment and will work with anyone who has problems, which is great. In the end though they aren't Immune to failures just like anything else.
 
In the no-failure camp, a dual float switch (upper limit as well as lower) that is warranted snail proof is pretty bulletproof.

Prize so far for snailproof is the Avast unit, which relies on water height in tubes, but it is easy to knock askew while servicing tank, so needs to be in an elbow-proof position.
 
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