Automatic Doser vs Manual Dosing

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I manually dose my reef tanks on a daily to weekly basis, for my alk I use gravity fed drip dosers and re-up them every other day or so, and for everything else I dose weekly. I used to have an automatic doser but unfortunately it malfunctioned and dumped a bunch of magnesium in my tank causing a big coral crash that took a long time to recover from. I lost a lot of my favorite corals from that so ever since then I've been wary about using a automatic doser again. Has anybody else experience something like this? And do you have a preference for manual vs automatic dosing?

 

[exnisstech]

I do both. I have some stuff automated and some I manually dose daily. I don't dose a lot of things but I have enough tanks running I don't want to have to dose everything manually. I've been lucky and haven't had a doser malfunction yet.

 

[Kooma]

I use a Vectra for carbon dosing, it spaces it out evenly across the daylight hours. I’d never want to dose that manually.

Used it for AFR in the past also.

I like the automatic doses, I think there needs to be consideration for a cheap Doser vs a more advanced one when considering.

 

[BriDroid]

I couldn't live without my automatic dosing pumps. I use mostly Hydros 2ml/min dosing pumps, but I do have a BRS 1.1ml/min pump that is use for trace elements. Without automatic dosing, I would forget and my tank would be a nightmare of instability! They XP8 and the AC dosing pumps have been super reliable for me. I like them much better than the Blenny or Minnow controller pumps. I sold a Minnow a while back. I never could get it to calibrate correctly. No issues with the AC pumps.

 

[DeepDiver55]

Gonna be a vote for automatic dosing. I pretty much suck at remembering to dose in real time - thx ADHD.

 

[BryanM]

I am a dosing pump user. 7 of them to be exact.

1). I am forgetful, so manually dosing the tank would suffer.
2). I am a big advocate for dosing multiple times per day which would be nearly impossible if dosing manually.

 

[saltwaterfish.com Verified Sponsor]

I am a dosing pump user. 7 of them to be exact.

1). I am forgetful, so manually dosing the tank would suffer.
2). I am a big advocate for dosing multiple times per day which would be nearly impossible if dosing manually.

I think I'll try out another automatic in the future, for right now I am comfortable with my routine but if it gets old I'll bite the bullet and do A LOT of research before getting one.

 

[DmitryB]

I've been dosing manually because I've been too busy to set up the BRS doser. Setting it up seems to be a multi-step process, but I should get to it. I dose AFR in both tanks and NeoPhos is one of the tanks (the one without Tangs.) So it's not a lot and I've been pretty good at remembering. But setting kit and forgetting it would be ideal. One of these days I'll figure these BRS dosers out.