Thoughts on Auto Water Analyzer and Doser

[droidus]

I am looking at starting to get into beginner corals for my biocube 32g tank. I am looking at purchasing https://www.marinedepot.com/neptune...ifi-aquarium-controller-marine-water-analyzer and https://www.marinedepot.com/neptune-dos-doser-ddr-reservoir-bundle. I asked my friend, who has a large tank, about this, and he said he doesn't trust the dosing pump that the apex system is controlled by. From time to time, the apex will reset or lose power. He says if you don't program it right, and it defaults to "on", it will dump everything into the tank. Does anyone have any experience with this? What do you recommend, or use?

 

[BoxKing]

AWC should have multiple redundancy failsafes - one which would prevent what happened to you buddy would be the addition of the optical eye - set to turn off the AWC as a IF code in settings, and another coded for the reverse, if the water pulled from the tank drops below your threshold from too much being pulled from the tank - in turn, your ATO would remain on, and your salinity would plummet.
On another note, there are many other ways a AWC can fail, so you might want to rethink this setup- especially on a 29G tank, where mixing one 5G bucket with salt could last you a month in biweekly water changes ~10%. Think of it this way; if you setup an AWC, and you experiences a failure that kills expensive corals or fish, or overflows and destroys the sump/flood etc... was it worth it? In the grand scheme of things, biweekly water changes = 26x/year, and if you premix a 5G bucket, you essentially are only mixing 13x a year. Instead of using the DOS for AWC, use it for two part dosing - so you can comfortably extend your water change routines by adding the supplements stripped from the water by the corals back into the tank Cal/AlK

 

[elysics]

AWC should have multiple redundancy failsafes - one which would prevent what happened to you buddy would be the addition of the optical eye - set to turn off the AWC as a IF code in settings, and another coded for the reverse, if the water pulled from the tank drops below your threshold from too much being pulled from the tank - in turn, your ATO would remain on, and your salinity would plummet.
On another note, there are many other ways a AWC can fail, so you might want to rethink this setup- especially on a 29G tank, where mixing one 5G bucket with salt could last you a month in biweekly water changes ~10%. Think of it this way; if you setup an AWC, and you experiences a failure that kills expensive corals or fish, or overflows and destroys the sump/flood etc... was it worth it? In the grand scheme of things, biweekly water changes = 26x/year, and if you premix a 5G bucket, you essentially are only mixing 13x a year. Instead of using the DOS for AWC, use it for two part dosing - so you can comfortably extend your water change routines by adding the supplements stripped from the water by the corals back into the tank Cal/AlK

Op wasn't talking about AWC though


Anyways, op, if you are just starting to get into beginner corals, there's no need at all to get an auto tester and have it adjust things automatically. Test everything manually and dose by hand, once you get a feeling for how everything works and the amounts you dose by hand get to large, you get a dosing pump, preferably a 4 or 6 head one. And then, if you are totally in sync with your tank and you are getting tired of testing then you can get an autotester.

Getting all that stuff and running it before you learned how everything works is dangerous. If what you want is to not need to learn that stuff at all, paying a maintenance company or sticking with weekly 20% waterchanges is probably better on the long run