bill.mccrary42
Community Member
Typical situation - I have kasa wifi electrical timers. No real issues with them so far, but they do suffer from a fatal flaw in the scheduling in that they operate on events. So you can set an outlet to turn on at some time, then off at some time. If something goes wrong, for example a brief power outage, the outlet will turn back on in its previous state. So if say at 1:00 the outlet turned on and its supposed to turn off at 1:05, then at 1:02 there was an outage that lasted until 1:07 - well guess what, when the power comes back on that outlet stays in the last state, which was on, forever until another OFF event is triggered... And that's what happened to me & my alkalinity doser.
I usually keep a steady 9dkh, 5 mins of dosing a day. Last night it got stuck on for 2 hours. I noticed it during evening feed time. I panicked naturally but when I looked in the tank, everything looked fine nothing freaking out, clear water. Immediately did a test, Hanna checker showed 15 dkh... I took a deep breath, and just did a ~40% water change. This was late at night, so I mixed another batch of seawater and went to bed. Next morning everything in the tank looked fine. I still did another 40% water change, and now I'm back to 9.8dkh. My magnesium stayed solid at 1350 but my calcium did drop from the usual 425 to 410. So I'm dosing a little extra calcium over a couple days to get back up there, and have turned off all alk dosing. I plan to test every day or two until I get back to 9 then resume the normal schedule. I haven't lost any fish or corals, so far, thankfully & knock-on-wood.
Now some questions:
I usually keep a steady 9dkh, 5 mins of dosing a day. Last night it got stuck on for 2 hours. I noticed it during evening feed time. I panicked naturally but when I looked in the tank, everything looked fine nothing freaking out, clear water. Immediately did a test, Hanna checker showed 15 dkh... I took a deep breath, and just did a ~40% water change. This was late at night, so I mixed another batch of seawater and went to bed. Next morning everything in the tank looked fine. I still did another 40% water change, and now I'm back to 9.8dkh. My magnesium stayed solid at 1350 but my calcium did drop from the usual 425 to 410. So I'm dosing a little extra calcium over a couple days to get back up there, and have turned off all alk dosing. I plan to test every day or two until I get back to 9 then resume the normal schedule. I haven't lost any fish or corals, so far, thankfully & knock-on-wood.
Now some questions:
- The timers - my crappy temporary solution was to make redundant OFF events - say it turns on at 1pm, I have an event to turn off every 2 mins for the next 10 mins. This happened 1x out of ~15 kasa timers. Do those fancy controller units suffer from the flaw I describe above? Or are they much better at knowing an outlet's desired state vs relying on events?
- Do I have any incoming surprises related to this? Or do you all think I'm out of the hot water for now?
- I've read horror stories and I've read people say that more often than not, these sorts of events don't cause any major die offs. I'm sure like everything in this hobby it depends on so many things. What sort of things could cause these events to swing north or south? Did I have high mag/calcium already and it buffered better? Was it the short time frame between event and 1st major water change?
