1 ml increments, and it works great on that tank. The Kamoer doser I have on my 40g tank will dose in. 2 dKh in a day.įinally, I'll note that some multi-head dosers will provide less than a 1ml dose. Even with the BRS dosers, just changing the time per dose by a couple seconds can change dKh in my 10g tank by.
So now in my 10g tank, I dose eight times a day. So if, you want a doser for a nano tank, you absolutely need the ability to dose at less than 1 ml per dose, and you need to do it with reasonable precision. I could even make things more even by dosing 12 times a day without too much variation. If I'm dosing 30 ml/day in a 100g tank, I can easily do six doses a day at 5 ml/dose, and keep things very precise. None of this matters in a bigger tank because the dosing volume is much larger. I also reduced the frequency of the dosing from six times a day to three times a day, which made the pump workable. So I had eventually diluted the dosing solution 4:1 with RODI water, and dosed at higher levels. If I dosed ten doses of 1ml each, I would get anywhere between 7 and 12 ml total. In other words, if I use a single dose of 10ml, I would get 10 ml. And then I found out that if I dose in 1 ml increments, the precision of the dose is not very good. This is because the motors dose very quickly, about 1 ml/second, so dosing anything smaller isn't really possible. So I set up my doser to dose 2 ml per day, six times a day.īut then I realized that the pumps in the DP-4, which are typical for many dosers, can only dose with reasonable accuracy in 1 ml minimum doses. That way daily swings in alkalinity are minimized, which is critical for keeping sps. Since the whole point of dosing is to ensure as much stability as possible, it's better to dose in several small increment throughout the day, rather than dumping the entire daily dose at once. In my tank, I typically needed to dose about 2 or 3 ml per day of each part. I dosed two part Seachem Reef Energy, which is a concentrated 2-part liquid dosing solution. Maybe it would help to explain how things went for me when I tried to use the Jebao DP-4, a typical four-head doser at the cheapest end of the market, which doses about 60 ml/minute, with a minimum precision of 1 ml (which turned out to be more like 2 or 3 ml in practice). It would probably need to have a precision of. So if you can come up with a controllable doser that flows at 5-15 ml/minute, that would be really nice, but only if the dosing precision is below 1ml. As far as I know, it's either 1.1ml/min for the BRS dosers, or it's more like 60 ml/min for the typical multi-head doser.
I think 5ml/min would be OK, but I don't know of any dosers on the market today that dose at that rate. What about a dosing pump that is smaller, cheaper, adjustable (flow rate) and has the option of being connected directly to Apex (24DC port)? One less power supply. Maybe some people need drop precision, but most people? Why would you need slower than 5ml/min.? 5 seconds would dose less than 0.5ml. What would be the ideal minimum flow rate? 1.6ml/minute seems way to slow. What do you think about a dosing pump that comes with a power supply for stand-alone use (with a separate timer, just like most people do with BRS and Drew's dosing pumps), but also has an optional cable for connecting it directly to the 24DC port of a Neptune Apex controller? Would that be a desirable option?Įasily replaceable pump heads. 1ml accuracy? Adjustable flow rate from 5 - 14 ml/minute would be ideal? Good enough for the needs of most nano reefers? Must be able to dispense small doses with a good level of accuracy. Perhaps additives like the ones from KZ (Zeovit). I assume that most nano reefers use dosing pumps for: I'm considering building a product prototype. trying to find out the ideal feature set for nano reefers.
I have been researching a bit about dosing pumps, testing a couple of them, comparing features, etc.