Quite the productive day :)

[spacedcowboy]

So today I started on the NSW mixing tanks at the other end of the house to where the display tank are. These are each 350G, and I go through them reasonably rapidly because I change 20G per day. I used to get (filtered) NSW delivered from Half Moon Bay but that stopped recently, so I wanted to set up an automated-as-possible solution before I run out of my current ~300G-remaining tank....

Here's what they look like:

... they're painted black and also put under black cloth with weighted sandbags to prevent sunlight from powering algae growth. You can see the result of the day's labour, with an Apex set up in a waterproof box and ready to be set up to monitor float switches, and use a solenoid to allow RODI water to come into the tank if we're in "make NSW" mode. The inside of the box looks like:

... so, ready (for two tanks) to have salinity probes, float-switches to determine when the tank is full, control mixing pumps, and have some manual buttons to start sequences of actions going.

I bought some float switches and needed to mount them, so I fired up the laser cutter and cut out an adjustable bracket to mount at least 2 float switches in (one for level, one set higher for STOP)...

All I need to do to get this to work is put a screw through the vertical part of the top of the tank and adjust it up and down to suit. The float switch then goes on just like:

They seem to work well enough in practice. While I had the laser-cutter on, I roughed up an RODI line wall mount for the fish-room. I've got 3 DOS dosers mounted in the fish room, and the lines are untidy. I'd bought several different-coloured 5M lengths of silicone 1/4" tube, so I could easily see what went where, and wanted to mount them on the wall around to the tank and down to the dosing containers. The design looked like:

... which, when assembled, gives me a flush-to-the-wall push-to-fit contraption that looks like (this is the green silicone tubing ...

All told, I'm pretty happy with the day's work

 

[sfin52]

Wow thats a productive day

 

[eloser]

20 gallon water change a day? Good god, how big is your tank?

 

[spacedcowboy]

20 gallon water change a day? Good god, how big is your tank?

It's 350G display, 400G total volume, but the water-change is automatic - I have one of the Genesis Reef Systems "Renew" modules, and I think it's a real shame they've gone out of business.

The sole effort I put into water-change is to tap the button that counts how many 1-gallon water-changes it performs every day. It's currently set to 20. When you have 700G of NSW available, 20G doesn't seem extreme...

 

[Karen00]

All I can say is WOW! I couldn't be that productive in a month! Haha.

 

[PeterC99]

Very nice work!!!

 

[spacedcowboy]

So I mounted the AdaptiveReef switches into the top right of the external enclosure, as in

... and then a day or so later, it looked like:

... I'd wondered why switch-6 (one of the toggles) had gone from closed to open on its own. Presumably the fall... Anyway the velcro was clearly not up to the California sunshine, and in fact wasn't really even tacky to the touch.

So I set up some 3mm acrylic in the laser cutter, knocked up a quick design for a bracket to hold the box...

​

It's in 2 parts, there's a ring to snap around the back of the box, so provide some lateral support, and then a baseplate to be acrylic-welded to the back of the AdaptiveReef box. The screw-holes will line up and provide 6mm of support thickness, which ought to be plenty. After welding and leaving it for 24 hours, it looks like:

​

 

[spacedcowboy]

So the overall goal here is still to get the NSW mixing tanks as automated as possible, and one of the things I want to do is have a reliable measurement of the salinity over time. The Neptune conductivity/salinity sensor doesn't have a great reputation for being accurate, with the main reason apparently being bubbles getting into the sensor and throwing off the readings.

Now I didn't really expect to get bubbles - apart from when mixing the salt, there won't be much water flow at all, but that is a problem in itself - there ought to be a constant flow of water over the sensor. So there's a 'Salinity Probe Stability' Kit that "Vivid Creative Aquatics" sell, which basically lets you orient the sensor so the bubble-escape hole us upwards and constantly flow water over it.

What I wanted to do was mount that into the tank towards the bottom - and I needed a way to mount both the SPS kit itself and the pump that'd provide the water flow. The Neptune PMUPv2 seems tailor made for this sort of thing, so it was back to Lightburn to make something that could hold everything in the right place...

Different colours here represent different cutting stages, it'll cut the red lines, then the blue, then the black. The larger blue circle is sized to hold a PMUPv2, the smaller blue circle sized for the SPS kit, and the rectangle is sized to correspond to the red 'T' shape. The idea is that there will be a 6mm-thick piece of acrylic that extends from the top of the tank down to almost the bottom, then this piece will slot into a hole in that, then the T slot will lock the above part in place. I'll probably put a hole in there for a zip-tie in the final version so things can't slip out of place.

Once I'd cut the above, and also a test piece to represent the rod extending down from the top of the tank to the bottom, it looked like:

Or, lying down flat - which might be a bit clearer:

​

The really cool thing about the laser-cutter is how quickly it works. It's taken me longer to write this post than it did to design and cut the holder-plate and cut a test-part to see how well it would mount. Of all the CNC machines I have (and I have a few ) the laser-cutter is my favourite.

 

[Cory]

Did you say you have a lazer cutter? Impressive project!

 

[spacedcowboy]

Yep - finished part that's in the tank now:

It looks a little weird when taking a photo inside the tank ,because you see the reflection of the wall where the sunlight hits the water surface, and you can't easily judge depth, but it's about 30" down into the tank here:

I re-jigged the bottom part slightly to move the heavier part towards the shaft, so there was less moment of inertia on the shaft, and to add a hole for the temperature probe. So now it holds the PMUPv2, the temperature probe, the Salinity Probe Stabilization kit (and hence the salinity probe) and has a slot at the other end to allow it to be slid up and down to suit the depth - that just makes it easier to get installed.

I need to temperature-stabilize it (which apparently isn't automatic) but so far so good...