My new toys

[Samper]

I'm in the process of getting my new limewater reactor setup running. Here's a rundown of what has gone into it.

1 MRC Medium Nilsen with timers MRC--Nilsen Reactors
2. The Admiral peristaltic pump Kalkwasser Dosing Pumps - Admiral
3. Reefwerks holding tank controller /bucket setup
Reef Werks

Worlds most expensive 5g bucket

The bucket contains the holding tank controller. The admiral draws FW from it and feeds it to the Nilsen. The Nilsen then drips into the system near the skimmers intake.

The admiral seemed a bit tough to program but once I read the 5 page manual wasn't really bad at all. For those of you that aren't familiar with this stuff it's pretty nice. Each piece of equipment has taken me a while to save up for. The Admiral runs on a digital timer or not depending on your needs. The timer has 8 on and off settings for a total of 16 different options for each day of the week. It has a really nice feature in that it can tell you at any given time how much has been dosed and the amount dosed per hour from each of the parallel channels can be adjusted from 1 to 300 cc. I can dose around 2 gallons in 12 hours if I want to. I've managed to get those two different size hoses together by stretching the 1/8" hose slightly with heat so that it snugly slid over a T barb fitting. Zip ties and a prayer are holding it together until the other parts arrive. There isn't any real pressure on the line though and I am fairly certain I won't have any problems out of it. Currently I have the timer set to start dosing an hour before my lights go off with an hour break from 3-4 AM and starting back up until an hour after my actinics have come on. The amount to be dosed over the night will have to be tinkered with for a bit until I can really get it dialed in. For now it's dosing approximately 1 gallon every night. I may end up running it 24 hours a day for a few days during the week but for now this will do. I love Andys work and hope his fiasco is a huge misunderstanding because I'm now running two of his reactors. I've never had a problem I couldn't handle from the Ca reactor and the Nilsen is built extremely well. The Nilsen is set to stir for 30 seconds every 4 hours and does a great job from what I've seen so far. I don't have any pictures at the moment because I just threw it all together to test it out. Things are a bit messy but will get some up once everything is settled in. I'm hoping that someone wanting to setup a Nilsen will now have a good idea how I set mine up. When I was researching setting one up I found a ton of people running them but not a lot of explanation about the setup.

[Samper]

Here is the temporary setup. I'm really out of room in my cabinet so I'm sort of growing outward.

[jle9123]

Nice!

[DonW]

Toys are nice. How are you liking the kalk reactor sor far?

Don

[Samper]

I really like the way it performs. It's only ran for the past two nights but my ph swing has gone from 8.1 - 8.4 in a 24 hour period to 8.2-8.4. I'd like to tighten it down and raise it one more tenth so that I can keep 8.4-8.5 24/7. The recommended setting on the reactor was to turn the pump on once every four hours for 15 seconds. With 4 cups of Kalk in it I have to run it for 30 seconds instead. I'm really liking everything so far.