Curious how everybody does their water changes. Right now I have my mixing station in my garage and I have a 50 ft piece of tubing that reaches my tank in the living room. I drop a pump in the tank that has another tube that runs it down my kitchen sink to drain. I'm considering either the auto aqua changer or a dos for my water changes. I'm not ready to completely automate them as I would like to be there when it happens, but I don't want to have to pull the hoses through the house. I know there are a lot of Apex users on here, but I'd like to know if anybody uses the auto aqua system as well.
Manual automated water changes
- Thread starter Dmac
- Start date
the challenge I see is speed - the DOS and auto aqua will both take a bit to perform the water change. You can manually trigger with either one. If you want to babysit it - you'll be hanging around the tank for a bit depending on how much water you change at a time.
2 things to watch for - with the DOS solution - that depends pretty heavily on you having the pumps calibrated very close to each other.
The auto aqua - I personally used one to do AWC on a 30 gallon tank - it worked great as the ato & awc for several months - and then one day one of the pumps kicked on and didn't shut off. Luckily I work from home and noticed it - the only way to get it to stop was to unplug the whole auto aqua unit. I could have been an edge case and may be an exception - I removed it from my tank and went back to a different ATO solution.
On our current tank - I drain in to a 32 gallon brute, then that gets pumped to the sink drain with a small pump I dedicated for this purpose. My water storage is in the garage - luckily I have a little portal that goes from the garage to the room with the tanks. I have the pump on my mixing station plugged in to smart plugs that are controlled by alexa - so I grab the hose, put it in the tank - and yell "hey alexa, turn on water pump 2" - and the water starts flowing. A shout to alexa to stop water pump 2 makes it stop. I close a valve, coil up the hose and it stays tucked away for next time.
2 things to watch for - with the DOS solution - that depends pretty heavily on you having the pumps calibrated very close to each other.
The auto aqua - I personally used one to do AWC on a 30 gallon tank - it worked great as the ato & awc for several months - and then one day one of the pumps kicked on and didn't shut off. Luckily I work from home and noticed it - the only way to get it to stop was to unplug the whole auto aqua unit. I could have been an edge case and may be an exception - I removed it from my tank and went back to a different ATO solution.
On our current tank - I drain in to a 32 gallon brute, then that gets pumped to the sink drain with a small pump I dedicated for this purpose. My water storage is in the garage - luckily I have a little portal that goes from the garage to the room with the tanks. I have the pump on my mixing station plugged in to smart plugs that are controlled by alexa - so I grab the hose, put it in the tank - and yell "hey alexa, turn on water pump 2" - and the water starts flowing. A shout to alexa to stop water pump 2 makes it stop. I close a valve, coil up the hose and it stays tucked away for next time.
This is how I currently do it as well. Drain into the toilet tho and then pump the salt from the garage with a 50ft hose as well. It's easy enough that I haven't thought of trying to change it. It literally takes me about 20 min to do about a 20g water change and this includes clean up as well. I only do it every other week, so not too bad.
Masterflex variable speed dual channel peristaltic pump.
With flow adjusted to perform continuous water change at 40% per month.
I may be looking into the Moonshiner’s Reef method to reduce, or possibly eliminate, water changes altogether.
With flow adjusted to perform continuous water change at 40% per month.
I may be looking into the Moonshiner’s Reef method to reduce, or possibly eliminate, water changes altogether.
I forgot about the Alexa part, but I use that as well. I guess I need to stop being so lazy. Considering my first tank required me to mix up five gallon buckets at a time and pour them directly into the display, I need to be happy that I'm down to 15 minutes, LOL.
A WC with a Neptune DOS will take forever make a very loud whining noise while it runs
