Cali Kid Corals

JVU’s RSR750

Thanks for the reminder! I really need to update here, will do. Things are going well, my main problem right now is too much growth and not enough space for frags, which is why I’m giving away a bunch. I’ll be fragging more as I make more space, with more pay-it-forward’s and DBTC’s to come.
 
Yesterday early in the morning I got an alert from Apex that one of my 2 heaters wasn’t drawing power when it was turned on. I was able to quickly take a look before going to work and see one of my titanium heating elements had failed off.

Because of the redundancies and alerts/safeties I have built in (described above in this thread), it is only a minor annoyance since the one that is still working can (barely) keep my tank to temp by itself, and because I was notified right away. So I bought a couple new heating elements and when they come I’ll swap one in. I have other smaller heaters laying around I can use temporarily if needed.

Also I was surprised to see that it was Heater2 that failed, the one that only rarely comes on, and when it does it stays on for a much shorter period of time. It has easily gotten less than 1/20th of the use of Heater1, which is still working fine. I guess it speaks to the seemingly random nature of these failures. Looking at the failed heater, I don’t see anything visibly wrong with it. Anyway I’ve been using it for years so I’m not surprised or upset that it eventually failed.
 
It’s validating that your redundant heater setup did what it was designed to do. Glad to hear nothing was harmed!
 
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The redundancy is one thing, but yeah really speaks volumes on how the build quality between heaters can differ so greatly. Especially considering the titanium heaters don't typically have much in the way of electronics in them, i.e. no temperature sensors/switches that typically are failure points. Maybe it's one of those things where it needs to be turned on periodically to allow the expansion of the metals to reseal everything... of course I'm just wildly guessing.
 
Yeah the heating element that failed doesn’t have any integrated controller or any moving parts I’m aware of, just a cord to a heating element that’s wrapped in titanium.
 
JVU said:
I implemented a pretty simple hack for being able to show a graphic for how much liquid is left in a reservoir that isn’t a Neptune DDR when using DOS as a pump.

I dose my Triton 3-part with 2 DOS pumps and 1 DDR. I use the DDR for parts 1 & 2 of my Triton Core7, and a larger DIY dosing jug for part 3 (which doses as much as the other 2 combined). I like the graphic tiles that show at a glance how much is left in each of the DDR containers, but it has always annoyed me that it won’t show how much is left in my non-Neptune container, even though I’m using DOS pumps for it, and even though you can enter the volume of the container, the Apex updates the volume as solution is used, and all other relevant details to be able to show it are there. Like Neptune saying “No pretty graphic for you unless you buy our DDR”.

Anyway I came across a solution by making the DOS think that it is plugged in to a DDR. Some EE folks obviously much more knowledgeable than I am figured out that if you connect with a tiny resistor the top left and top right wires of the 6-pin Molex plug the DDR uses to plug into the DOS, the system will see that as having a DDR connected and will allow you to use their pretty graphic. They also figured out how to wire up additional float/level sensors, which I didn’t have a use for at this time. In case you want the result without the wiring, there‘s a guy selling kits with plug/sensors on EBay.

The smart people who figured this out:
www.reef2reef.com

Apex DOS DIY level switch?

CuseReefer, I know this is an old thread. I was not on r2r, but googled and this thread came up. I did this mod to both of my dos units. It works flawlessly. I just wanted to thank you for sharing this info. I only signed up to thank you, but I’ll look around here a bit out of curiosity.
www.reef2reef.com www.reef2reef.com

Although pretty simple as far as this kind of thing goes, I’m not very experienced with wiring/soldering, so it was a good learning experience for me.

By the way, I tried to find the plug and resistors at 4 different local stores and was unsuccessful (a couple months ago before the lockdown), so I eventually ordered from Amazon.

The 150 ohm resistor (comes in multi-packs):

E-Projects 25EP514150R 150 Ohm Resistors, 1/4 W, 5% (Pack of 25): Single Resistors: Amazon.com: Industrial & Scientific

E-Projects 25EP514150R 150 Ohm Resistors, 1/4 W, 5% (Pack of 25): Single Resistors: Amazon.com: Industrial & Scientific
www.amazon.com
View attachment 14746

The plug was hard to find, I wound up getting this one:
View attachment 14745

View attachment 14747

These top 2 wires are the ones to connect with the resistor, the other 4 to be cut close to the plug:
View attachment 14741

My old soldering iron was broken so I had to get a new one, I‘m happy with this basic Weller:

I soldered the 2 wires to each end of the resistor, then put shrink wrap tubing around with a heat gun.

Finished and plugged in to the DOS:
View attachment 14740

Voila, pretty graphic for my Alkalinity container (I didn’t update the volume yet, but notice the larger total volume):
View attachment 14742
Click to expand...
This is the kind of quality hack I come here to find, nice work!
 
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