Quote:
Originally Posted by ttabbal
I'd like to give this a go. I have a floor drain available, just need to connect up some tubing to drain the skimmer to it.
Am I correct that if I do this, then set the skimmer to run wet, and put 1.026 saltwater in the ATO, I'm going the right direction? I would also need to set up RODI for evaporation makeup, or set the ATO water to a lower salinity to compensate. Of course I will monitor salinity daily via refractometer and compensate for any swings.
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You will still experience evaporation which ordinarily would be replaced with fresh water since evaporation leaves the salt behind. Your ratio of water loss to evaporation versus water loss to skimming will dictate your make-up water target salinity. The art in a wet skimming setup is in finding just the right salinity in the make-up water to replace the salt you're skimming out, while not causing the tank salinity to climb over time. This will take careful monitoring and it will likely change seasonally.
Depending on how wet you decide to skim and how much evaporation you have, if either of these is really small compared to the other, and your inhabitants can tolerate the swing, you can get away with just monitoring it and adjusting it periodically. In time, if you just run a fresh water top off from a container and find you need to add about a cup of salt each week to the tank to make up what you're skimming out, you can just add that cup of salt to the week's container of fresh top off water and the result is a more stable system. Continue to monitor and adjust from there. If you top off direct from a plumbed RO/DI, it is a bit more challenging to automate. My first idea would be to slowly dose a saturated saltwater solution in small quantities with a peristaltic pump similar to dosing two-part. Some aquarium controllers may be able to dose it as salinity drops below a trigger point if you trust that sort of thing.