Instability with fleece roller and ATO?

aaron186 · Aug 4, 2023

I'm having some issues with my roller mat and ATO and was hoping for suggestions. My tank is a reefer 425 (112 gal total). I have a Red Sea roller mat 500 and a neptune apex with ATK. I'm noticing that my roller mat eventually turns, the water level inside the roller mat drops, resulting in my sump volume increasing. The volume is significant enough to raise my return chamber high enough to eventually trigger the high water alarm sensor on the ATK. I'm also wondering if this fluctuation is causing my salinity to eventually be unstable. My sump has a float valve built in, which I am using in place of the float valve on the ATK unit due to fit. I'm wondering if taking the low and high water sensors off of the base magnet and onto their own separate magnets with more distance between the two will result in less alarms? Any suggestions?

blaxsun · Aug 5, 2023

I'd probably leave the Neptune setup as is, but in the ReefBeat app you can change how much the fleece roll advances. I'd try adjusting it to smaller increments to see if you can't find the optimal rate that doesn't impact your sump.

tzabor10 · Aug 5, 2023

I have a trigger fleece roller and it was weeks before the bugs were tweaked out. Just be patient and buy extra rolls. What brand ATK are you using?

aaron186 · Aug 5, 2023

tzabor10 said:
I have a trigger fleece roller and it was weeks before the bugs were tweaked out. Just be patient and buy extra rolls. What brand ATK are you using?

Neptune ATK

blaxsun · Aug 5, 2023

aaron186 said:
Neptune ATK

So per above, what amount of advancement do you have your ReefMat set to? Also, are you running the standard ATK programming or have you made any custom changes?

aaron186 · Aug 5, 2023

blaxsun said:
So per above, what amount of advancement do you have your ReefMat set to? Also, are you running the standard ATK programming or have you made any custom changes?

Standard programming. The roller was set to default of .8-1inch. I just reduced it to .6 to .8

blaxsun · Aug 5, 2023

aaron186 said:
Standard programming. The roller was set to default of .8-1inch. I just reduced it to .6 to .8

Even a 0.8-1.0" advancement wouldn't raise the water level in the sump by that much - there's just not that much volume in the fleece roller.

It doesn't matter if the high level sensor gets triggered - it's supposed to work that way (there are two optical sensors as a fail safe). The slight amount of water between the low/high sensors shouldn't drastically affect your salinity, so I wouldn't worry about that.

As for the alarms, you can always disable those.

aaron186 · Aug 5, 2023

blaxsun said:
Even a 0.8-1.0" advancement wouldn't raise the water level in the sump by that much - there's just not that much volume in the fleece roller.

It doesn't matter if the high level sensor gets triggered - it's supposed to work that way (there are two optical sensors as a fail safe). The slight amount of water between the low/high sensors shouldn't drastically affect your salinity, so I wouldn't worry about that.

As for the alarms, you can always disable those.

I have a float valve back up. But disabling the alarm would remove the redundancy. This is why I’m thinking that separating the float valves onto 2 different magnets spaced a little further apart would be a better solution

blaxsun · Aug 5, 2023

aaron186 said:
I have a float valve back up. But disabling the alarm would remove the redundancy. This is why I’m thinking that separating the float valves onto 2 different magnets spaced a little further apart would be a better solution

Moving them apart could potentially make it worse... I've been running the ATK for well over a year and it works flawlessly. I don't have alarms set because it's pointless (I have 2 optical sensors and a float).