Warning to Profilux Users

[DiverDude]

Not to take sides, but on a conceptual level, I'm with Myka on this. A smaller reservoir is less of a potential point of failure than a large one.

Why ?

We use technology to simply the complex tasks; the simple ones can be left to the dumb humans. The instructions to the warm body checking your house daily is "Take this jug of water and use it to keep that reservoir full". If they can't handle that then perhaps they shouldn't have a key

Consider the 2 possiblities with respect to the ATO and its reservoir:

1) Small Reservoir

a) Float failure and ATO pumps entire contents into tank. If properly sized, this should not create an overflow situation and is unlikely to decrease salinity to a dangerous level. The caretaker should raise the alarm on a suddenly empty ATO reservoir after a single day.

b) Float Failure of a different nature and water is never added to the tank. Well this should show itself in diminishing sump levels and the caretaker should raise the alarm that they DIDN'T have to put any water in the reservoir.

2) Large Reservoir

a) Float failure and ATO pumps entire contents into tank. Well...big mess; major salinity drop...tank crash

b) Same as above

It's worth noting that a float switch in your sump can be used to warn of situation 'b' (for both reservoir sizes).

All that being said, if your reservoir is REALLY small and needs to be filled daily then you have to ask why you'd spend money on an ATO in the first place.

Somewhere in there is a reasonable compromise and I'm guess it's in and around the 3-4 days worth mark.

[Myka]

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

I can tell you, unless you have a special tank sitter your paying for or a very very good friend, you start asking people to spend 3 hours at your place making water ect and your going to be looking for some one else the next time.

Steve

A professional aquarium maintenance company will spend as much time with your tanks each day as you're willing to pay for.

As I said above, I always had all the water made up for the tank sitter, he just had to put it in the proper places when it was needed. He did mix up saltwater himself for waterchanges using the RO/DI that I had stored for him. If I had the space at the time I would have had all the saltwater pre-mixed for him too.

I have been using this same aquarium maintenance company for a few years now, and he is very reliable. When I was away in June this year he came to my house twice a day for a week because of certain situation that called for this.

In the end, a person does what s/he feels comfortable with and hopefully that combined with some luck is enough to keep our reefs alive while we are gone.

[sphelps]

To each there own but I have no interest in a so called auto top off that still requires manual top off. If my tank used 5 gallons a day and I leave for 2 weeks I need 14 5 gallon jugs. To me that's just ridiculous and that's just two weeks, possibly planning a 6-8 week trip next year, what do I do then? If we can't fully automate something as simple as replenishing evaporated water then we should probably start rubbing sticks together to heat our homes and riding horses to work. I also helped a nice guy out last year in Calgary who paid a ton of money to only suffer a complete crash at the hands of a so called "professional" aquarium maintenance company so it's not always as simple as that.

In any case the point here was just to raise awareness of a said "feature" relating to Profilux which isn't documented but I think people need to be aware of. If people want to discuss my ATO in general I invite you to do so in build thread where I'll happily entertain any thoughts you have. I actually posted a new ATO schematic asking for feedback, I want all failure modes identified so please go nuts.