Winner winner chicken dinner.
Thank you very much. Yes, this was the correct manual, and I fully understand the settings now, but it did require some back-and-forth on other forums. It seems like folks had a similar but not the same controller and various understanding of where limits are with the Difs and delay (d) values.
Therefore, for those who, like me, just wanted to use this controller to get a consistent temperature of around 78F in the tank, here are the settings steps with some additional explanation:
1. Select F. You could use C too, but the steps below are targeted to achieve 78F.
2. Set S1 to 78. This is the heating turn-off point, not the turn-on.
3. Set DIF 1 to 1. This means the heating will only turn on when the temperature is 1F below the S1 temperature. In this example, the heating turn-on will be 77F (78-1). If you set this value to 2, the heating will only start at 76F (78-2). With the setting at 1, the temperature will fluctuate between 77 and 78 F. Testing this in the past few days with the APEX temp probe, the average temp will go below 77.5. If this is too low for you, you can increase the S2 to 79 (and change S2 accordingly to 80). This will then get you an average temperature of around 78.5F (from what I have measured).
4. Select H1. This means that the S1 temperature triggers the heating mechanism (subtracting the DIF value from the S1 value as outlined above).
5. Set d1 to 0. This setting only applies to cooling and is therefore not needed here (but potentially below for the chiller settings).
6. Set S2 to 79F. This is the cooling turnoff point, not the turn-on point. This will not cause an issue as the cooling will stop at 79F, and the heating will only turn on at 77F, which will be a sufficient buffer, in my opinion.
7. Set DIF 2 to 1. This means the cooling will turn on at 80F (79F+1).
8. Select C2. This means the S2 value will be a cooling trigger (adding the DIF value to the temperature).
9. Set d2 to 5. This means there is a cooling delay of 5 minutes (up to 20 minutes possible) to avoid a constant on and off of the chiller (not sure if this is relevant for a reef tank, though, but I might be very wrong). I use the small Tunze Eco Chic fan as the chiller, which works great for the 26-gallon tank to bring down the temperature, and I would not have this concern, but I keep the 5 in my settings.
I have tried the above for the past few days, and it works very well (heating and chiller), and I highly recommend this. Below is the summary of my equipment:
- BRS Titanium Heater (100W)
- Tunze Eco Chic Fan
- Aqualogic (former Ranco) Dual stage controller (TR115DN)
The above is installed in the RedSea Max Nano Peninsula.
