Quote:
Originally Posted by whatcaneyedo
An auto feeder that dispenses frozen food. I've seen a few interesting DIY jobs involving mini fridges but nothing even remotely compact.
Plasma lighting in the 14K spectrum.
I'll put my hand up too for the Alkalinity monitor.
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Ya, I've pondered trying my hand at a frozen feeder as well and have some ideas that'd make it really compact. The trick is the cooling system. If you're OK with big, then standard refrigeration works (but there is somewhat of a lower limit in how small you can make it for a reasonable price). Thermoelectric is also a possibility but can be finicky. There is one other way of doing it that gets rid of the refrigeration all together but I'd have to look into the cost. If it's affordable, it'd be very simple to implement.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ScubaSteve
There are commercial probes for exactly this and they last quite a while... but they ain't cheap ($250+) and seawater can cause them issues. I used to have 5 or 6 of them in my lab (we specialized in electrochemistry) and tried them at home a few times with relative success. I believe Pinpoint Monitoring actually makes a somewhat affordable unit and, if I remember correctly, was reviewed by Randy Holmes-Farley in one of the reefing magazines.
The kicker with these units though is that to get accurate measurements they sometimes need to be paired with a pH probe. The potential (i.e. voltage) of an electrode shifts 0.059V per decade (meaning one pH unit, such as if the pH shifts from 7 to 8). Doesn't sound like much but once that error gets factored in, your measurement could swing wildly with pH shifts throughout the day, talk additions, etc.
So, it can be done but it hit always going to be cheap.
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Because Calk/Alk probes seem to be pretty popular I've been thinking this over quite a bit today. I experimented making some ion-selective solid state probes a few years back that were very cheap to make. I think I can adopt this to work with calcium without too much issue and, if I'm lucky, I might even be able to do the same with all as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Animal-Chin
A fitration system that takes in your dirty tank water and spits out water as clean as the day you made it. The filter would remove all bad items but leave the salt and all trace elements. A true sea water purification system that is easy to use.
It would remove all algae, nitrate, phosphate, pests (ich) and just return water that only had the good stuff left in it.
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And that, good sir, is a tall order
Technically possible but very, very, very.... very cost prohibitive
