Top-off float switch got stuck last night......
Posted 10/10/2009 at 10:48 PM by MrSandman
But i was lucky....i have an Aquacontroller 3 that kept things from getting out of control. Like most people i also like topping off my tank with kalkwasser saturated water. My AC3 will top-off with kalkwasser or freshwater based on the tanks pH. If pH goes over 8.15, 2 solenoids activate. 1 solenoid activates to shut off the kalkwasser supply, and the other solenoid activates to open a bypass which allows freshwater to top-off the tank instead. Once pH drops back down below 8.15, it reverses and allows kalk saturated water back into the tank as the bypass solenoid shuts off all flow. So i was lucky in the sense that had i NOT had the AC3, my top-off would have continued to dose kalk water and driven my pH through the roof and likely nuked the entire tank.
Well, some people will then say...what about salinity? Doesn't that get affected? Yes, however, i have 2 things going for me. I use a peristaltic dosing pump as my top-off pump, and i also have a secondary float switch that will shut off the dosing pump if the primary float switch sticks on. The benefit of a peristaltic dosing pump is that it doses at a very slow flowrate. Something around 1 cup every 30 minutes. If i check my tank on a daily basis, i'll easily catch this before anything remotely bad were to happen as the dosing pump does things sloooooowly. With my AC3, i can also control how much water it can dose at any time by varying the time periods. In my case, when my float senses that water is low in the sump, it will dose in intervals of 15 minutes on, followed by 45 minutes off. It will continue this cycle until the float senses that i have enough water in the sump. So what saved me last night wasn't my back-up float switch (the water level hadn't reached that yet). It was the fact that water topped-off so slow that nothing bad can happen fast AND the emails that i was getting to my cell phone. You see, the other neat thing about the AC3 is that you can have it send an email any time something is triggered. In this case, i had it set to email me when my pH hit 8.15. Had i not caught the emails, rest assured.....the AC3 would have kept dosing until it hit the secondary float switch. At that point it would have also sent me another email, AND it would have shut down the dosing pump completely. This thing is awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, some people will then say...what about salinity? Doesn't that get affected? Yes, however, i have 2 things going for me. I use a peristaltic dosing pump as my top-off pump, and i also have a secondary float switch that will shut off the dosing pump if the primary float switch sticks on. The benefit of a peristaltic dosing pump is that it doses at a very slow flowrate. Something around 1 cup every 30 minutes. If i check my tank on a daily basis, i'll easily catch this before anything remotely bad were to happen as the dosing pump does things sloooooowly. With my AC3, i can also control how much water it can dose at any time by varying the time periods. In my case, when my float senses that water is low in the sump, it will dose in intervals of 15 minutes on, followed by 45 minutes off. It will continue this cycle until the float senses that i have enough water in the sump. So what saved me last night wasn't my back-up float switch (the water level hadn't reached that yet). It was the fact that water topped-off so slow that nothing bad can happen fast AND the emails that i was getting to my cell phone. You see, the other neat thing about the AC3 is that you can have it send an email any time something is triggered. In this case, i had it set to email me when my pH hit 8.15. Had i not caught the emails, rest assured.....the AC3 would have kept dosing until it hit the secondary float switch. At that point it would have also sent me another email, AND it would have shut down the dosing pump completely. This thing is awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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