Auto Water Change

I use the litermeter III with 2 remote pumps one for auto topoff, one for pulling waste water, and one for new water.

I personally do 10L a day

 

I don't do auto changes but it's pretty simple none the less. Total volume of around 250g and do 25g a week. I just open a valve on my manafold and water drains to washer drain. Then I flip a switch and it pumps back from my resavor. Thought about going the rout Donny is using but it's so easy now I just haven't been able to justify the funds lol.

 

I really like it haven't had an issue yet. Every 800hrs I do maintenance on it

 

What maintenance do u do? Just courious, do parts need replaced?

 

I replace the tubing and clean the plastic things that rotate to pull water through the tubing... idk What they are called lol

 

+1 on the litermeter III. Had mine going a bit over 2 years now with no issues. Draw new water from about 8' down and push the old downstairs and over about 25' to hit the first available drain. Havent had any issues with salinty drifting any so i would say the once calibrated they are pretty accurate.

 

Thats also my goal @blackx-runner.


I was wrong I just went and looked im doing more then 10L a day.... Im doing around 5g a day so 35g a week

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Also for my own piece of mind I calibrate it once every 2 months just to make sure

 

Probably similar run time, i only change 8.5l a day, have the maintence timer set for 100 hrs. About 4-5 months I will pull apart, clean up the rollers and recalibrate. Sure beats lugging buckets up and down stairs. Plus no more mad wife when i would slop waste water when trying dump it.

 

I've been doing automatic water changes with a 2 pump litermeter system for nearly 2 years. My total water volume is near 60 gallons and I change a gallon a day.

I truly believe this is the only way I could have a reef tank. Before the automatic water change system was installed I had quite a few issues everytine I did a manual water change.

I never did figure out what exactly was causing the problem but after I installed the Litermeter I haven't had a single "event" just happy corals and fish.

 

I have a litermeter III also and run the ATO, along with the water change. 2 week ago I cleaned all 3 pumps on the litermeter and accidentally reversed my ATO pump with the outlet pump when putting the waterlines back on the pumps. After about 10 days I noticed the ATO water barrel in the basement wasn't changing as much as normal. My salinity got up to almost 1.029 thankfully nobody died and none of the corals looked like they cared. I ended up doing 5 water changes over the course of 2 days where I would remove tank water and replace it was RODI water in my sump and everything seems back to normal now.

 

How did you decide on a gallon a day?

 

@ruggerkc I decided I wanted to change 50% of my water per month (personal preference) and then did the calculations to get down to what the litermeter III doses per day. I have a 125G tank with 20G sump so I want to change roughly 70G per month. 70G / 30 days per month = 2.3G per day. This is similar to the gallon a day that waverz said in his/her 60 gallon tank. He/she is also changing roughly 50% of the water per month.

 

Fyi...I'm a he.

 

So I am sure you all thought of this,but if you drop your waste line in a tank with an overflow it makes a great QT or a way to make dry rock into live rock.