constant drip with salt water??

[Chase31]

I have been reading into this and belive getting the salt water to drip in would be very easy but with my ATO would it be imposible to make it drain at the same time?? has anyone tried this with salt water or would it render my ATO useless and send my salt levels through the roof??

Any thoughts on this would be apritiated

[chi]

Do you mean the water will always be fresh? If so, your corals might starve. Your water will basically have no microorganisms.

Also risky as the slightest difference could affect your salinity. Say if left alone for a few hours and the salinty drops by .01 per hour. It is scary. Theres no way to know how much your water evaporates. Too many things will affect it. Its as if youre doing a weather forecast.


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[Alberta-newb]

Are you looking at dripping saltwater in as a continuous water change or are you talking about top-off due to evaporation? For a continuous WC the most effective way (in my opinion) is to use a double-head peristaltic pump (dosing pump) that way water in is equivalent to water out. If your talking about top-off, you definitely don't want to be adding saltwater, usually just fresh (unless you're trying to slowly raise SG.

Francis

[HaZRaTTy]

I don't see anyway to accurately doing this that is easy.

If you had a SW drip you would be swinging your Salinity. and If you added a FW drip the same.

I suppose you could set this all up on a dosing system and code your own program to try to keep the balance of your salinity by your ATO playing catching up and monitoring how much your draining or vice versa with adding freshwater and dosing salt.

Either way it makes my head hurt how much would be involved in doing this do you see people doing this with their reef systems? How do they achieve it.

Even if you could the window for something to go wrong or fail would be catastrophic in more then one way if not caught right when it failed.

[Myka]

Continuous waterchanges are VERY uneconomical. You wold be better off sticking to a regular waterchange schedule.

[Chase31]

Continuous waterchanges are VERY uneconomical. You wold be better off sticking to a regular waterchange schedule.

That's what I assumed. And difficult to do maybe I could set up a double dosing pump to pump out say 5g old water and 5 new water once a week, just looking for a way to try to avoid doing large water changes. Already have An auto top off and someone feeding the tank due to my 16 days on 7 days off schedule for work, the more automated the better.

[mike31154]

Personally I prefer larger water changes on a less frequent basis. I do about 23 gals every 3 weeks on my sumpless 77. Perhaps not as convenient as smaller or automatic changes, but the difference in water quality after the change is immediately apparent. By doing small frequent water changes, I think you end up with more 'old' water in your system long term. I keep track of my water changes on an Excel spreadsheet that I modified from someone else's efforts years ago. It includes a calculation that provides the percentage of old water to new water after each water change. Not sure exactly how the calculation works, my math skills are lacking, but larger water changes are always going to get more 'old' water out of your system than small ones, even if you do frequent small changes. As soon as the new water is mixed in with what remains of the old, your opportunity to further renew with fresh water is pretty much nixed since you will be taking out some of the 'newer' water with 'older' water to make room for the real fresh stuff. Hope that makes sense. Pretty much the reason that small or continuous water changes are not that economical as mentioned by Myka.

[Spyd]

I have heard of people doing this. Techincally, it can definitely work. 2 dosing pumps is all it would take. 1 drop in, 1 drop out. The problem being that these pumps need to be extremely precise or it will cause too much water or not enough water in your tank. You definitely wouldn't want 1 to fail and 1 to remain on.

As for ATO, it will have no effect as your ATO replaces evaporated water. I wonder if you could end up with ALK issues though as a lot of salts have higher ALK amounts. So you would be replacing the current stabilized alk levels with higher alk levels everyday. I don't know if this would even be an issue but something to consider when trying to stabilize your water conditions.

[Aquattro]

I see no benefit to this at all. More of a PIA if anything. If one pump stops, you get a flood. The other, you lose water that your ATO then replaces with FW. The whole benefit to doing a water change is at best minimized, or completely negated. With a 50g tank, doing a 15g water change once every three weeks is way simpler and better for the tank.