Reef Pi Auto Water change

[brian.badge]

I am working on getting my reef pi setup to do automatic water changes for me. I am testing , but I am having issues.

The concept is to use a timer to run a macro that pumps fresh saltwater in for a certain amount of time. An ATO with an optical sensor then pumps out water until it is back at the correct level. Simple and it should work.

Timer triggering a macro - So far this isn't working for me at all. I set it for 11 this morning, but nothing happened.

Macro- turns on fresh salt water pump for xx seconds. This works well, but I learned the hard way to make sure the fill line went into the top of my tank to avoid creating a siphon.

ATO with optical sensor and a pump on a reversed relay. That makes the ATO empty the sump until the sensor tells it to stop. The relay is "off" when the sensor is wet and so the pump is running. When the sensor goes dry the relay turns on and then pump turns off. When it works its great, but the optical sensor keeps missing and the pump tries to run my sump dry. THIS IS BAD. I had a backup float switch set to alert me if the sump is low but it kept triggering every few minutes despite no change in water level. If I can't sort out this part I won't be able to rely on it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am wondering if I should look in to other options or just go back to manual changes.

 

[brian.badge]

To elaborate on the float sensor issues I have them connected to a macro that sends an email saying "Sump level low" or "Sump level high". After setting it up I started getting email from both every few minutes.

 

[brian.badge]

The ATO for emptying water is working as expected right now. I am going to chalk the over emptying up to it being a new optical sensor. I had similar issues with my Tunze osmolator until the sensor had some time in the water.

I am handling the timer issue by trigger the pump directly from the timer rather than a timer triggering the macro which triggers the pump. I loose email notifications, but it runs. Hopefully the issue gets resolved in future updates.

Regardless at this point I am have functional auto-water changes. I only let it run when I am present for now, but hopefully it will prove reliable and I can just keep the salt water reservoir full.

 

[brian.badge]

The ATO for emptying water is working as expected right now. I am going to chalk the over emptying up to it being a new optical sensor. I had similar issues with my Tunze osmolator until the sensor had some time in the water.

I am handling the timer issue by trigger the pump directly from the timer rather than a timer triggering the macro which triggers the pump. I loose email notifications, but it runs. Hopefully the issue gets resolved in future updates.

Regardless at this point I am have functional auto-water changes. I only let it run when I am present for now, but hopefully it will prove reliable and I can just keep the salt water reservoir full.

I spoke to soon...once again it pumped right past the sensor and triggered the top off....sigh

 

[VonCali]

No luck getting anywhere on this? I’m quite curious and like your solution as I’m interested in doing this as well soon.

 

[Ranjib]

just going through this thread. Are you hitting a bug in macro execution? If so, let me know i'll try to fix it asap. I use macro , but not with timers, i used them on demand during my water change

 

[Ranjib]

Make sure the macro is declared as reversible., else timers wont be able to trigger it