Quote:
Originally posted by Randall_James
As I recall, Anthony did a chart about this. Am not quoting the chart but it essentially stated
100 Gallon tank
100 Gallon water change = 100% water change
100 one gallon water changes = 90% water change
I think, I can not find the chart now but hey that is plenty effcient if I am even close to his chart.
ON the roti feeder, couldnt you just keep this system seperate from the auto top off? What I mean is that the auto topoff is pretty important (even more so when on vacation, and the only reason I had to make one btw) I like the idea but again the KISS principal is sort of the goal here? Neat concept however.. As long as it would not contribute to the failure rate of the system (key word was "careful eye on roti pops")
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The problem is that the continuous drip from the top would result in the sump level slowly rising, so there's no where to set-up a water-level-controlled auto-top off. That's why I thought of using less saline water in the drip to (try to) keep salinity constant given an estimated level of evaporation (salt creep/spray is very low in my current setup, but that would be another more-difficult-to-measure issue).
In terms of failures, there's no electricity involved at all in the water change/top-off system (just the sump pump). As long as the sump can hold the main tank overflow w/ pump off + ~14g, if I drop dead it still won't overflow.
The roti culture will be tricky - I haven't read about anyone having it auto-drip to the main tank, so that might be a problem. If it crashed, at worse I'd be dripping frozen phyto water straight to the main, which isn't bad (I'm staying away from growing live phyto in the top 10g - I think frozen concentrate will be easier and better).
On %water change, I think if you keep total % the same (e.g. 1/24% every hour, 1% a day, or 7% a week) and assume removal or excretion of X molecule is constant (e.g. not concentration-dependent), the concentration of X molecule in the water asymptotes at the same concentration. There's an article in Advanced Aquarist that shows graphs for this.
Ryan