How do you fill your ATO?

[Bbio]

Honestly curious how everyone fills their ATO.

Are you bucketing your RODI around every other week? Do you have an elaborate hose setup in your walls that fill it? Something else? Share what you have going on!

We have 2 tanks that are in our living room/dining room. I find myself bucketing water during the weekend, but I'm sure there is a better way...knowing my RODI lives in the basement and probably needs to get about 8-10 feet of head pressure to fill the ATO res under the tanks.

I have the 10.5 gallon RedSea reefcan that has a handle. Once every 15 days or so I pull the hose out of the sump, disconnect the power for the pump and hold the tube/cord in my left hand and carry the container by the handle in my right hand and bring it to the RODI in the laundry room to fill up. Then carry it back to the tank and hook it all back up. Once filled.

 

[exnisstech]

My rodi and fresh saltwater are stored in the basement and I pump both up using a pond pump and a python hose with the pump connected to a $10 remote controlled outlet.

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Fill up a 5g bucket and lug it over to my tank.

 

[petcellar]

I might do something similar. When I remodeled to prepare for the new tank I installed a conduit in the wall behind the tank to allow for future upgrades. I could run a long RO tube from the Brute with RODI in the garage up through the attic and down through the conduit to the ATO. How do you control the dos for ATO refill?

Meanwhile I use two 2.5 gallon bottles to fill the ATO manually. It holds 14 gallons so I only have to do it every few weeks and its really not bad.

So right now I use the DOS for both ATO and AWC like @subodhs did in this thread.

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/why-do-people-buy-expensive-ato.1090871/

The weakness here is that it depends on the salinity probe. That being said - there is logic to cut it off and alarm if there are large swings, and if there is a slow calibration drift of the probe I should catch it on my own with intermittent hydrometer testing.





But for when I was using the DOS for ATO only I did it like this:

I had two optical sensors in the sump.

My coding was as below:

Fallback OFF
tdata 00:00:00,1,19,6,2,2,148,130,6,62,2,28,11,0
If ATO_1 CLOSED Then OFF
If ATO_2 CLOSED Then OFF
When On > 360:00 Then OFF
Defer 001:00 Then OFF
Min Time 030:00 Then OFF

Basically dosed 5 gallons of RODI a day.... but stopped when either optical sensor was wet.
If it ran more then 6 hours without stopping it should turn off.
I had both sensors at the same level.... more for redundancy than high/low sensors.

My current evaporation rate is about 1.5 gallons a day, so this worked without a hitch.


I guess I should clarify - I'm not using the DOS to refill the ATO - I'm using it as the ATO, with the RODI brute from the mixing station as a water source.