ATO Refill control

[dR3ws3r]

I have 3 aquariums in one room, all of which have ATO reservoirs that I currently fill manually. I am setting up an RO/DI system in the basement below this room with water storage for eventual automatic water changing. For now I would love to create a system for just filling up the ATO reservoirs when they are low. Each tank has an APEX controller for it. I was thinking about using a dosing pump for each tank and pumping up from the main basement ro/di reservoir when they are low and stopping when each upstairs ATO tank level is met. It would be nice to have some redundancy in case the high level sensor fails. It seems like most shutoff or float valves are made for RO/DI systems where stopping flow just stops all the RO/DI system from running, including the booster pump. I feel like that float valve or even a solenoid won't work very well with a dosing pump. I could use double optical sensors for high level and high/high level, but that is kind of expensive and also could "possibly" fail. Has anyone done this type of thing before and could give me some thoughts on what they did, and how it works?

 

[n2585722]

I have 3 aquariums in one room, all of which have ATO reservoirs that I currently fill manually. I am setting up an RO/DI system in the basement below this room with water storage for eventual automatic water changing. For now I would love to create a system for just filling up the ATO reservoirs when they are low. Each tank has an APEX controller for it. I was thinking about using a dosing pump for each tank and pumping up from the main basement ro/di reservoir when they are low and stopping when each upstairs ATO tank level is met. It would be nice to have some redundancy in case the high level sensor fails. It seems like most shutoff or float valves are made for RO/DI systems where stopping flow just stops all the RO/DI system from running, including the booster pump. I feel like that float valve or even a solenoid won't work very well with a dosing pump. I could use double optical sensors for high level and high/high level, but that is kind of expensive and also could "possibly" fail. Has anyone done this type of thing before and could give me some thoughts on what they did, and how it works?

I do not have an Apex but I pull my ATO from my garage using a dosing pump. So my ATO pulls from my 20 gallon DI reservoir. The controller is also setup to refill it from my RODI unit when it goes low. The Refill has a maximum on time setup and there is a float valve on the RODI input in case the full sensor were to fail. I also have a leak detector there for the pumps, reservoirs and the RODI unit so a leak at any one would shut off all of them and send an alert. My AWC pumps and ATO pumps are also in the garage. The tank is 35ft away from the garage. Not sure how you would setup to do that on an Apex though.

 

[dR3ws3r]

I'm not sure what controller you use really matters much, as long as you can detect a level, time or a leak, you can probably use any controller to shut things down.

I'm not sure I follow your setup though. Where is your controller ... in the garage or by the tank? I think the Auto water changer station logic I can handle particularly since it is easy to put the float valve as a secondary safety feature when directly filling up the main supply ro/di tank.

What I am most worried about is when I refill the local ATO reservoir at each tank. I can shut off the dosing pump when the level sensor says the max level is met, but I'm not sure how to add a secondary safety check. You do mention time though, which might help. Perhaps I can calculate how long it takes the dosing pump to fill the local ATO reservoirs and set the dosing pump "on" time to just less than that. So then when it goes to fill the local ATO I can stop when either time expires or when the max level is met. At least that gives me two options.

I was also wondering about what dosing pump to use. The new DOS is fine, but I want to use that for the auto water changes since it has 2 heads and they are expensive. I have some Ecotech versas, but they don't play nice for this type of operation. Turning them off and on can have unexpected results and sometimes they can "make up" for power outages for scheduled dosing. I'm not sure what a good economical dosing pump would be to use to pull water up say 12 feet from the basement to the room above it. And they would be pumping 10+ gallons at a time.