Automatic Continuous Feeder

[aquaknight]

Have you had anytime to experiment with other foods? If something could be figuring out to accomidate larger pieces, I'd love to try, with fish (Butterflies, Anampses wrasses, and Anthias) that need feed between 3-7 times day.

 

[santamonica]

I bought a second pump, and will be testing it with mysis and larger stuff. I'm guessing that mysis will be the largest it can handle.

 

[santamonica]

Well 43 ml per day was too much for the scrubber to handle by itself. I was cleaning over a pound of algae from the scrubber each week, but it was just not enough (this scrubber was just sized normally, and with only one screen.) My ultra low phosphate situation ended quickly, and I started getting a light pastel blue in the Salifert phosphate test (nitrate stayed clear, however.) So now it's back down to 28 ml per day, and dosing is now every 10 minutes. I also put some gfo back in to speed up the recovery.
I must say that the increased food did seem to speed up the growth of the digitaga, stylaphora, birdsnest and superman. The tubastreas and goniporas are happy as always. The white dendronephtha is not so well; I either started the increased food too late after putting the coral in, or I have the wrong food, or it was just not enough food. Could be flow too, off course. But it's starting to hang and not inflate. No change in the scleronephthya... still partially open. I'm going to move it to a lower flow area. The dark purple gorg did not make it. It was not receding or growing algae, but it completely stopped opening, so it was just a matter of time.
For nephthas and nps gorgs, I'm going to try just getting many small ones of the same type, and putting them in different places. That should help identify flow problems, since food is constant throught the tank.
One big nice thing is not having to feed the fish anymore. Every 10 minutes they are chasing the food that is coming out of the tube.

 

[santamonica]

In my year of usage, I've refined things a bit:
1. I'm only feeding blended oysters now. Is much simpler, and cheaper, and covers all particle sizes from 1 to 200 microns. Most important: Oysters STAY SUSPENDED. Most other foods will settle to the bottom and clog the tubing. I'm using Reef Nutrition Oyster Feast, but similar would be fine. This food will stay suspended a whole month without touching it!
2. I don't get the air out of the feeding bag first.
3. Put a 4" filtersock in the chiller first (fits perfectly, and covers the icy cold steel wall). Then put a 1/2" or so of paper towel on the bottom, to keep the bag off the very-cold bottom area. Then just lightly put the bag in. No need to cover the top if you leave the chiller on "continuous".
4. Wrap the tubing to keep light and heat away from it, especially the heat from the chiller. Also, for the part of the tubing that goes from the pump to the tank, if you wrap it with a thin towel and let the towel touch into the tank water, the water will keep the towel wet, and therefore keep it cool.
5. Clean the air-filter on the chiller periodically.
6. For NPS, especially any seafan, put them near and in the direct flow of a powerhead. Even though the polyps may look like they are bending out of shape, they are still getting the most food this way.
7. Super high flow throughout the display, and sump, is critical. You don't want anyplace where the flow stops, since the food will settle out. While settling may help feed the snails, it won't help the corals.
8. Keep a thermometer in the chiller, which you can see while walking by. It stays between 28 and 33 degrees F. The food won't freeze as long as you have a filter sock covering the walls, and have paper towels stuffed at the bottom, and don't cover the top.
Misc:
I once turned off the feeder (but kept feeding the fish/eel) for a month. Every NPS died, along with some other corals, within 3 weeks. The notable exception was a copper colored flower pot that thrives. I never target fed, and won't.
The medical pump has been found on ---- for as little as $100 USD.
Get a backup chiller. They are cheap, but not sturdy. I had one go out.
Continous feeding puts a ton of food into the water, so start doing it SLOWLY, maybe just 1.0 ml per DAY (not per hour), to see if your Nitrate and Phosphate filtration can keep up. It takes about 3 weeks for the effects of the excess food to show up as increased Nitrate or Phosphate or nuisance algae, so don't think you can increase it each day because you are not seeing any problems yet. If after 3 weeks there is no Nitrate and Phosphate or nuisance algae problem, then slightly increase the feeding amount. There is no limit to how much your corals can eat; the limit is how much Inorganic Nitrate and Inorganic Phosphate filtering you have. If you are designing a system to have a continuous feeder, and a scrubber, then the bigger the scrubber the more you can feed. I'm currently feeding 4.0 ml/day total, for 100 gal. This of course does not include the fish food (about 8 square inches of nori per day), or the eel food (one silverside per week).

 

[reefaholic33]

I just tried to find that pump and couldn't find anything close to even 300. On the auction site or google. Any suggestions for what to search under? I did everything I can think of.

 

[cranberry]

Anyone have any ideas for something other than the cloth hanging in the tank as a means to keep the line cool?
You just have to keep searching. It's the used ones you'll get cheap, but they don't pop up all the time. It took me something like 6 months of searching to come up with 6 cheaper ones. They also come from people selling off stuff from hospitals. Some of the stuff I bought I had to sign waivers for that I wasn't using it for medical equipment, but was using it for an aquarium. That's because you need a license to buy some medical stuff.... feeding pumps are not one of these (but sometimes they ask for it anyways). I use some syringe pumps (meant for IV use) and those I had to sign for.

 

[reefaholic33]

^ Well I will keep looking then, all the new ones I saw were 1600 which isn't justified for me. I like a good hunt though. I already bought a couple wine chillers so hopefully I can find one cause I don't drink wine lol.
I was always wondering about a better idea for the output line.

 

[garick]

Its to bad you can't just use gravity and a cheap little valve to control the amount.
If you want it to get into the tank and it is a fluid. Couldn't you simply hang the cooler up higher, start a gravity feed and then use a valve like you would for acclimation?

 

[cranberry]

The way the bag sits in the chiller, it would not be able to run via gravity. Especially at such a low rate. The further up the bag is, the more tubing you'd have between the bag and the tank. Then there would be the issue of the food getting warm with the "extended travels".

 

[garick]

how about air compression. Like an air tank on the back end pushing it?

 

[santamonica]

Yes just keep a link to that Bay site that you check every few days. After a few weeks you'll find some.
The drip idea could only work on a big tank, and if you diluted the food. My 4 ml/day on my 100 gal is about 5 drops per hour, which would certainly clog up. But if you had a 300 gal, it would be 15 drops per hour. And if you diluted 10 to 1, it would be 150 drops per hour which would be 2.5 drops per minute. Then, if you had super filtration, you could try dosing 10 times that, which is 25 drops per minute, which is about one drop every 2 seconds. That's about as slow as I think Oyster Feast would drip.

 

[santamonica]

I've now raised my liquid feeding to 12ml per day. N and P are both "clear". Matter of fact, instead of looking at the Salifert nitrate test from the top (which always looks clear now), I now look at it from the side, and compare it to an identical holder of just plain tank water. A few weeks ago it had a slight pink compared to the tank water (from the side), but today it was just as clear too. It does stay a bit "cloudy", because of the test chemicals, but the important part is that it is "clear" of any pink.
Since 12ml is double the 6ml I was feeding before, many of the coral tentacles have come out, and remain out all day, much farther than they did before.
If you are using the same pump as me, I've learned that if you are blending food yourself, the pieces don't get small enough for reliable pumping with this pump, because there is a tiny "particle filter" hidden inside the blue tubing device, designed to block large particles. What I did was pull the blue silicone off, and file off the plastic particle filter with a needle file; then put the silicon tubing back on. It worked much better. However I have since switched to the pre-made bottled oysters, and they are extremely finely blended, so there is never a clog.

 

[Jess Johnson]

It can pump up to 12psi. So if you have a chart of height vs. PSI, you can figure it out.
Also for Drew's pump, I've known about it for a long time, and the problem you would probably have is the high-dosages. It's not designed for a 0.1 ml dose. And there even are other cheaper options, but with the same problem. Cheap enteral pumps (like a "Ross Patrol"; minimum dose = 1 ml/hr), or a regular peristaltic pump (like the Reefdoser; minimum dose = 0.4 ml/hr) is the large dose. They can't go down to 0.1 ml/hr. So only large tanks would be able to use then as is, for things like Reeds Phytofeast (which is very concentrated.) For things like Rotifers or Mysis, 0.4 ml/hr would be 3 cubes/day, and 1 ml/hr would be 8 cubes per day. And that's the minimum. The only way around this is to dilute the food with water (which Reed's says not to do), but then a month's supply would not fit into the wine cooler, which means it would not fit on top of the tank, which means it would have to be kept in a refrigerator far away. And that was the original problem with continuous feeding.

I am actually look for a way to do continuous feeding around 2ml/hr. I have been looking at IV pumps, but it seems like you know a lot more about this than I do. Any suggestions for what I should buy? Waterproof would be hugely helpful.