(upbeat music)
- Hey it's Thomas here
and today we're doing a quick review
on the AUTOAQUA AWC,
automatic water changer.
If you polled all the reefers in the hobby
on how they generally feel about doing water changes,
you'd probably find most find it messy,
stressful, generally annoying,
and just hard to lug around buckets of water,
siphon water out of their tank and then replace it.
The thing is doing water changes is one of the simplest
and easy ways that we can keep our water parameters stable
for our corals,
and we all know that our corals thrive on that stability,
so that's why we do them, even though we don't like to.
More and more reefers are getting onboard
with automatic water changes
and erasing the stress of doing manual water changes
and the time and mess that come along with it.
That and the widely spreading understanding
that doing small frequent 10
to 20% weekly water changes every week,
or even spread out over daily or hourly water changes,
has a measurable positive impact on our aquarium stability
and therefore coral health.
AUTOAQUA has a convenient solution for reefers looking
to get on the automatic water change bandwagon
that includes everything you need
to get started at an affordable price,
especially when you consider
that it includes an automatic top off.
They pulled out all the stops with Smart AWC making sure
that it's simple to setup and easy to understand so
that even a novice reefer can benefit
from having automatic water changes on their system
with minimal effort.
They've also implemented a variety of fail-safes
to make sure that nothing goes wrong
even when something unexpected happens on your system.
In the box you'll find the AWC Touch controller,
two optical level sensors,
three DC pumps, three tube holders,
three siphon breaks, and just shy of 20 feet of tubing.
Everything's plug and play once it's all connected
and you've installed the tubing and siphon breaks.
You simply drop the drain pump into your sump
and place the tubing from the pump in a container
equal in size to that of the fresh saltwater
or directly into a drain,
the refill pump goes into your container
of fresh saltwater
and the tubing from that pump into the sump.
Then place sensor one at the highest point
you want your water level to be at
and sensor two below as far as you'd like it to drain.
The distance between these two sensors will be the volume
of water that you're changing,
meaning you can easily change any percentage
of water from a system by changing
the distance between these two sensors.
Next set how you'd like the water changes to be performed,
whether it's every hour on the hour,
twice a week or even once every three months
and you're done.
If you don't have a sump you can place the sensors,
pump, and tubing directly in the aquarium,
or if you have an all in one style tank,
behind the filtration panel.
You also have the options
to adjust the refilling speed if necessary
and do water changes manually with the push
of a button if you wanna be there
to watch the magic happen.
Like I mentioned earlier,
AUTOAQUA also incorporated several brilliant fail-safes,
they call their QST or Quick Security Technology
that will give you both visual and audible alerts
while also shutting down pumps
to prevent damage to the pump or overfilling,
and these include a built in ATO
that will never run during an auto water change
avoiding any issues of the ATO
falsely reading the lowered water level
during the draining process
and dumping in RODI water which could cause big issues
with salinity.
The ATO will also shut off if the pump runs more
than three times longer than the first refilling time.
After a power outage the ATO will be shut off
and turned back on automatically after 15 minutes
to help prevent false sensor readings while the tank
and sump begin moving water throughout the system.
Similarly the auto water change refill pump
will shut off if it is running more
than three times longer than the first refilling time.
If a power outage occurs,
the timer countdown
to the next water change will be paused
and resume once the power outage has ended making sure
you don't miss out on a water change.
If the power cuts out during a water change,
the auto water change will wait 15 minutes
once the power is restored before commencing
to allow the tank or sump
to reach regular operating water levels
to prevent false sensor readings.
Lastly the siphon breaks included with the tubing
will make sure no matter the placement
of the water reservoirs
you won't get back siphoning into the aquarium
after the pumps run.
Simple, but a life saver.
The only concern I would have
with this particular water change system is
that it comes with relatively small pumps
so those of us who have long runs
to go between our aquarium and reservoirs
or have a lot of vertical height to cover
to get water to our aquariums,
the pumps might not be up to snuff,
however AUTOAQUA has already anticipated this
and has some smart sockets
that you can get that will plug seamlessly
into the AWC Touch controller allowing you
to using virtually any pump you'd like
with the auto water change system,
making it a really, really good tool for any reefer
that's looking to get into automated water changes.
The fact is, the AUTOAQUA Smart AWC
is an awesome turnkey solution
for reefers looking to get into automated water changes,
it's packed with safety features
and it's much less costly
than other controller based options out there
which makes it a great option
for just about any reefer.
If you need more convincing
on why automated water changes are the way to go,
check out the WWC BRS hybrid method playlist
where Ryan goes over the ins and outs
of why automated water changes are awesome
and save you a lot of hassle and keep things stable.
Go watch.