Any safety features for the ATO function?

[Paulo Hanashiro]

Hello to everyone.

First of all, let me introduce myself: I am back to the hobby after 8 years without reef-tanks. I had tanks of all sizes but what I like the most are nanos and picos. I'm now cycling a Waterbox Peninsula 15 (running for almost a month).

"Back in the day" , I used to have ReefAngel running my tanks so last month when I got the Waterbox, the first thing I did was to search for an open source aquarium controller and here I am.

Back to the business: I don't know if this is relevant or not (Please let me know if I'm wasting my time with this concern), but do we have any ATO fail safe features implemented in the reef-pi code? As I could not find anything in this regard.

Things like the max. amount of time the ATO pump should run and if exceeded, halt ATO and send some sort of alert (lit LED, buzzer, etc.).

From previous experience, I'm scared of having the ATO hung with the pump running and emptying the RO/DI reservoir into my tank.

Please let me know your comments.

Keep safe!
Paulo

 

[prdubois]

You could set it so the ATO only has power for 5min per hour.

 

[attiland]

You could set it so the ATO only has power for 5min per hour.

That is a good one. I have an ATO working without software. But the idea to cut the power of the water levels are over a certain level is something I would trust Reef-Pi for

 

[Paulo Hanashiro]

Thanks!

I ended up building a simple stand-alone Arduino ATO integrated with the reef-pi.

The Arduino will:
-Check if low water switch is activated for > 5 seconds and last ATO event > 30 seconds ago
-run ATO pump for 30 seconds max.
-If ATO pump ran > 30 seconds and low water switch is still active, disable ATO and lit ATO error LED.
-If more than 3 errors occurred in one hour, keep error LED on ATO disabled.
-When low water switch is disable, reset the error and back to normal operation.
-While ATO pump is active, send ATO status to reef-pi so I can have historic ATO usage logs.

Next step is to figure an elegant way for the reef-pi to alert me when the ATO reservoir is going low.

Cheers.
Paulo