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Omen

Omen

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Hi I just bought an ATO and everything is setup with an aqualifter. I have my saltwater in a separate bin with saltwater that I will manually fill once a week with. Do I need a separate pump for circulation for the saltwater in the ATO? Also what should I keep my salinity at in the bin for the ATO system?
 
ATO

Are you saing that you are mixing saltwater for ATO water? Top off water should be straight RODI water that has no salt in it. Salt does not evaporate like water does.
 
Yea but I've read in cases where the ATO fails its bad to use straight up RODI water, you want a lower salinity water so that if it fails you dont kill all your livestock.
Chuckytt said:
Are you saing that you are mixing saltwater for ATO water? Top off water should be straight RODI water that has no salt in it. Salt does not evaporate like water does.
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I think the bad idea would be to have your ATO pumping freshwater directly into your tank/sump if you didn't have some kind of redundancy to make sure it doesn't fail.

Many people will program their ATO on a timer to turn on only a few minutes a day, so if the ATO float switches fail, the pumps will only pump freshwater into your tank for 10 - 15 minutes or so.

Omen said:
Yea but I've read in cases where the ATO fails its bad to use straight up RODI water, you want a lower salinity water so that if it fails you dont kill all your livestock.
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Either way you can kill all your livestock. ATO is something to be darn sure is going to have redundancies and failsafes. Hyposalinity or hypersalinity can both turn your tank into soup.
 
Yea I have a reefkeeper so I should just do a program for it to run for 10-20 minutes a day
 
do you think 10-20 minutes a day is long enough for a 40B?
 
Omen said:
do you think 10-20 minutes a day is long enough for a 40B?
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Easy to test. Turn topoff off for a day, Refill manually to see how much it took to fill it back up.

Next test your aqualifter setup by running to see how long it takes to pump that same amount, add a little bit of fluff to account for pump slowing down over time.

There are lots of variables to how much evaporation you can expect per day. You just going to have to figure it out for tank.


There should be no reason to use anything but pure 0 tds ro/di water for topoff system ( unless your going to add a supplement such as ALK or kalkwasser ).

The best and simpliest fail safe is to size the top off resevoir small enough that if the entire contents where emptied all at once, would it overflow your sump and how much would the salinity drop. If won't drop more than 1.026 to say around 1.023 then that's the best resevoir size to use since you now have the worst case scenerio covered. 1.023 may not be ideal but not going to cause any real harm.

Second would be like others have mentioned use a combination of water level and time not just water level.
 
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Just to let you know the aqua lifter does not pull enough current for the RKL to shut off the pump! You will need to plug a surge protector into RKL and then the aqualifter into that. I found out the hard way! I figured out water lost and then timed the fill process to get correct time for ato on my RKL. I'm using straight RO.
 
Thanks I'll make sure to do that.
Goberson79 said:
Just to let you know the aqua lifter does not pull enough current for the RKL to shut off the pump! You will need to plug a surge protector into RKL and then the aqualifter into that. I found out the hard way! I figured out water lost and then timed the fill process to get correct time for ato on my RKL. I'm using straight RO.
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topping off with saltwater = bad

salt doesnt evaporate, so your adding more and more salt to your tank, raising your salinity. if you have a limited supply of top off water you should be fine.

check and recheck things, make sure that if your ATO fails your tank/house is not at risk. Make sure there isnt enough water in your ATO reservoir to overflow your system, and make sure that there isnt enough in there to kill off the system by bringing salinity down.

You can always add some salt, or heavy salinity water to bring it back up a smidge if you need to. regularly topping off with saltwater tho, will surely kill things off.
 
Also omen, that ato I sold you has 2 float switches for redundancy. If the first one fails then the second switch will stop the pump. Adding saltwater with ato is bad.

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Better to burn out your ATO pump on a smaller resorvoir of fresh water than to empty a larger resovoir of Saltwater into your display. NEVER NEVER NEVER use salt in your ATO system!
 
IMO: 2 float switches in not addequate redundancy without also being combined with either resevoir limited in size or time based.

The assumption is that water level is based purely on evaporation. While 99.9% of the time that may be true but your not accounted for other reasons why water level may fall lower than normal. A large water leak can be a big problem in itself but you don't want to compound what is already a problem by replacing what is exiting with freshwater.
 
Im glad you guys are telling me this now before i leave next week on vacation lol Thanks!
 
Hmmm... you should wait to set it up after your vacation. A week is not a long time to test run it. It would suck if you came back from vacation and your tank crashed.
 
Goberson79 said:
Just to let you know the aqua lifter does not pull enough current for the RKL to shut off the pump! You will need to plug a surge protector into RKL and then the aqualifter into that. I found out the hard way! I figured out water lost and then timed the fill process to get correct time for ato on my RKL. I'm using straight RO.
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So i setup my RKE with switch A being a float switch, in the software when switch A is opens i have it turning on my aqualifter, So your saying this will not work? I havent set my timers up yet but plan on doing that soon. I'll be dosing kalk this way through the aqualifter. When should i have the ATO run with the Kalk? During the night? set on time intervals?
 
Bakes said:
So i setup my RKE with switch A being a float switch, in the software when switch A is opens i have it turning on my aqualifter, So your saying this will not work? I havent set my timers up yet but plan on doing that soon. I'll be dosing kalk this way through the aqualifter. When should i have the ATO run with the Kalk? During the night? set on time intervals?
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If you have the aqualifter on one of the relay switched outlets on your PC4, then yes, that will work. If you have it on one of the solid state switched outlets you will find that the aqualifter won't shut off after it is turned on. This is due to the low current draw of the pump.

That said, a single float switch with no back-up is pretty risky. If it fails open then the aqualifter will run constantly. You would want at least a second float switch that is normally higher than the highest water level. That way the only way that anything touches it is if the primary float switch fails. Theoretically should be less likely that you would have a double failure this way, but still not impossible.

As others have said, in addition to the float switches, it would be best to have the aqualifter on a timer as well, such that it can only run for, say, 15 minutes per day. Additionally, your top-off reservoir should limited in size such that if all of the water were added to your system at once there would be relatively little (preferably none) damage to the inhabitants.

One more thing to look out for is that your top-of reservoir water level be below the level of the outlet of the hose going into your aquarium/sump. If the top-off reservoir water level is higher, then it will continue to siphon into the tank after the pump has shut off.
 
There are more essential redundacies that need to be in place for kalkwasser that isn't absolutely necessary for just a topoff with freshwater.

There is no mention if you have a pH probe for your controller. For redundancy ( along with time based ) I would never run kalkwasser without the controller able to shut if off based on high pH reading ( usually 8.6+ ) for added redundancy.

Kalkwasser can be your best friend but also your worst enemy. You can't be too careful. Just too many kalkwasser overdose/ accidents have caused tank crashed. So be smart and very thorough with all the things that could fail or go wrong.
 
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