Don't trust wifi plugs for dosers

[mwil79]

So this morning I'm sitting here enjoying my coffee and I hear my wifi plug click on to dose my morning alkalinity, I look over and see an empty bottle. My first thought was you forgot to fill it duh..but then I remember I topped it off about a week ago. I use a BRS 1.1ml a min doser for a few minutes in the am and pm so I went to check the app and see the average time on over the last 7 days 1 hour and 55 minutes!

At first I thought I screwed up the rules of on and off but nope it all looked good. Next I checked and saw it ran for about 10 hours yesterday morning dumping somewhere around 200 to 300ml of redsea alk in my tank. Needless to say panic sets in and I immediately grab my hanna tester...12.18...not as bad as it could have been. Throughout all of this I'm not even looking at my coral to see if anything is dead, meanwhile everything is WIDE open...some how going from 8.5ish to 12+ over a 4 hour period has had zero ill effects.


I checked further into my app and realized this either happened yesterday morning or the night before so all day yesterday with very high alk and all is well. Luckily I only use the smaller Voss bottles otherwise this could have been a lot worse. At this point just going to ride it out and let the coral use it up and have it slowly come down rather than shock it more with water changes.


Be careful with wifi plugs.

 

[MadReefer]

My alk went to 20ppm once with no ill affects and I was manual dosing.

 

[mnat]

Be careful brining it back down, you want to do that very slowly with smaller water changes and not dosing and testing. Swinging alk it what makes corals the most unhappy, depending on what corals you have, some might like the high alk.

 

[horseplay]

It depends on the relay used in these smart plugs. Solid state relay cannot detect the tiny current used by these dosers. My Kasa smart plug does use mechanical relays. At least I think it does because I can hear the click. However I used the trusted Apex Jr for my dosers.

 

[mwil79]

It depends on the relay used in these smart plugs. Solid state relay cannot detect the tiny current used by these dosers. My Kasa smart plug does use mechanical relays. At least I think it does because I can hear the click. However I used the trusted Apex Jr for my dosers.

Yah I can hear the click noises as well with these but apparently it decided to not turn off. I am still just waiting for the alk to drop down further and will be manual dosing till I can get a 2nd apex. 1st one is 2 floors down.