Dosing pump setup....any problems with this plan?

[SDguy]

Well, after borrowing a peristaltic pump from work to topoff my tank with kalk, I'm hooked. Works great. pH is way better. Anyway, I have to obviously return the pump I have. No way am I dropping 3 bills on a litermeter though. I was going to get the Aqua Medic doser. After a few calculations, I figured out it needs to run for a little over 7 minutes per hour (which equals about 350mL). Does anyone see any issue with having this pump turn on 1 or 2 times per hour during the course of a day? I'll be using my AC jr. to accomplish this.

Also, I'm a little confused about the use of a check valve if the pump is above the water level. Why is this? Aren't peristaltic pumps able to draw liquid up even if starting with air in the line? I thought they all could do this, no?

[jtravis2]

The check valve will prevent the pump from losing it's siphon. I've been using an Aqua Medic SP3000 and a Precision Marine Kalk Reactor to dose kalk for the past month and the main problem is the head pressure from the dosing pump to the reactor. The amount of head pressure creates momentary breaks in dosing i.e. if you plan on dosing for 10 minutes you may only get 7 minutes of actual kalk dosing. This makes it difficult to monitor how long to run the dosing pump. I control my dosing pump with an AC JR and haven't got it fine tuned yet.
Jim

[jtravis2]

The AC JR will only hold 40 program statments, do you have enough room to run it 1-2 times an hour?

[manderx]

the aquamedic only has 2 rollers, which is why it has siphon/startup problems. look for a real one (with 3 or more rollers) on ebay. i like the masterflex ones. they usually go for 35-55 for a single-speed. there are variable speed ones that go for a bit more.

[gasman059]

I sued to run innovative aquaticc nautilus and had some issues with clumpping- good luck.

[SDguy]

But if the pump is lower than the reservoir, but the output line end is higher than both, there should always be liquid in the pump, no? And the output line end would be sitting above the tank water line, so no fear of backsiphoning tank water.

Hmmm, the ACjr has no interval type program?

[manderx]

i've heard that the sp3000 tears up it's tubing faster than others.

plus if the water within the tubing intermittently drains backwards depending on what position the rollers stop in, then that will throw your timing off. because some times it comes on it will drip immediately, other times it will take a bit to fill the tubing back up.

the AC has a wavemaker timer that lets you define a minutes on/minutes off interval.

[SDguy]

I see what you are saying. Well, I'm not looking for total accuracy... just want to top off so that I only have to do it once every 4 days, not every 10 hours.

And yes, just got that info from the neptune forum about the interval program, thanks!