- Are you sick and tired of carrying around
heavy buckets full of water?
Are you tired of spilling water all over yourself
when you're trying to get it in your tank?
Well, have I got the answer for you?
It's an auto top off system.
Hi, I'm ReefMan and today we're talking about
no longer carrying buckets of water all over your house.
So, if you have never heard of an automatic top off system,
I think this is gonna change your life.
You will basically have some bit of electronics
that measures the water level in your sump
and you wanna choose maybe the return chamber of your sump,
somewhere where the water doesn't go up and down.
You set it, and what the water drops below
because of evaporation, a pump turns on,
or maybe a valve opens and just gravity feeds water
into your tank so you don't have to do it anymore.
So there are several different ways
or systems you can use for this,
they all work on that principle.
Some of them have extra bits,
maybe a float valve that you set really high
so that if it keeps dumping water in,
it can automatically trigger it and turn if off
before your sump floods.
There are pros and cons to a bunch of 'em,
some of 'em use electronic sensors
that you have to brush the algae off
and whatever might grow on them.
Some use just mechanical float valves,
which of course are great,
except for if you have snails and things like that
that might weigh 'em down
and then they just don't ever turn off
'cause they're constantly triggered.
So I use the Tunze Osmolator.
And it is really a pretty good system,
I like it quite a bit.
Except for one part, and it seems like this part
is causing trouble for a lot of people.
So right here we have the pump part of the Tunze Osmolator.
It's just a very simple 12 volt pump.
You wire it onto the controller and it turns on and off
and pumps water out of your reservoir
and you can then get your water out and into your tank.
These seem to only last maybe a year, year and a half,
before they just die.
I have tested this one.
It does not work anymore, although going in is 12 volts
so it should work but it doesn't.
So that is the only part of the Tunze Osmolator
that people seem to have issues with,
and Tunze has a way around it.
So if you buy this additional little relay box,
you can attach it as if it were a pump
and then attach a real pump.
Something that is not going to break in a year,
to your top off system.
The only thing I don't like about this
is it's obviously designed for a European market.
It has the European style plug in it.
It's just a simple relay,
it doesn't matter what the voltage is,
but because it's physically a European plug,
it's kind of an adaptor for the U.S. into the European plug,
the box, another European plug,
an adaptor and then out the other side for us.
It's not so great, it's kind of wobbly, a little bit janky.
In the U.S. market it'd be nice to see one
that has our style plug on it,
but all you have to do is chop off the old ends of the box
where you used to attach the pump.
These little squeezy black things need to come off
because the new relay box has a set on it as well,
and you can't attach a little squeezy connector thing
to a little squeezy connector thing.
So just chop these off, clean off the end of the wire
however you wanna do that and then jam the wires
into the box's little squeezy connector things
and then the box will just work for you.
You plug it in and you can plug a real pump in.
So I bought the, forgive my pronunciation,
the Sicci, it's Italian, Syncra Silent Pump.
And it's just a small little pump.
It pumps 185 gallons per hour,
but for our purposes, especially for an auto top off,
you shouldn't need 185 gallons per hour
to get your evaporation taken care of.
So really all you need to look for in a top off pump
is one that can push water up,
whatever level you need, for it to go out of the box
and into your sump.
Out of the reservoir and into your sump.
So I think this one can pump it up a few feet
which is more than you need,
and it's also this particular line of pumps is super quiet.
I cannot hear when this one comes on.
Sometimes I have to re-shoot videos
because this thing makes a racket when it's on
and you can hear it in the background
of the videos sometimes so I have to edit all that out.
But this new pump, you can't hear at all
and I wouldn't be able to tell you,
even though it's just right here,
if it was on or not 'cause it's really quiet
so the Sicci's super quiet or silent pumps, I'd recommend.
But really other than this pump,
the Tunze Osmolator really works pretty well.
It comes with a emergency valve
so that if your pump sticks on for some reason,
it will automatically turn off.
It has a little controller part
that shows the overall status.
If it's overfull an alarm will sound.
If it's running and currently adding water,
or if the water is just at the right level,
or if for some reason your pump hasn't turned on,
maybe your reservoir is empty,
then the too low light will come on
so it has nice status indicators.
And yeah, really the pump was the only thing
I didn't like so now that we've removed
the little squeezy connector things
and we've replaced it with their optional relay package,
even though it's kind of an adaptor into an adaptor
into the box into an adaptor kinda deal,
I think it'll work really well.
And as long as you can keep water off those adapters,
'cause they kind of are a little bit loose,
and keep it in somewhere that is not gonna get splashed
in your sump, I think it'll work well.
And certainly it lets you use a much higher quality pump
than this little one that comes with it.
It's something that's gonna last a lot better
from a company that actually makes pumps.
Although, Tunze also makes pumps
so you would think that their little thing here
would be a better quality pump.
But it's not, so yeah.
I'd recommend checking out the Tunze Osmolator.
There's a hundred other auto top off systems on there
but I would definitely at least recommend
having an auto top off.
Even if your tank is just 10 gallons,
you don't wanna suddenly change the salinity
when you add top off every day.
If you use a automatic top off system
then it's just gonna slowly add water all the time
and you'll never have those salinity swings
that sometimes coral and some fish can be sensitive to.
So you get better, more stable, overall water quality
which is really the goal of the entire reef keeping hobby.
So yeah, hope you enjoyed.
If you don't have an automatic top off,
I hope that this video, if nothing else,
put the idea in your mind
and maybe you can pick one up in the future.
You really can save yourself a lot of mess and annoyance
with buckets of water all over the place so yeah.
Hope it was fun.
Thanks for watching.
See ya, bye.