Seneye Reef.. Mindstream.. Monitoring.
I grabbed a Seneye Reef model recently.
General back story - my main system has been dry all year, and I've restarted it. I've done a lot the same, and a few things different - including using nitrifying bacteria to speed up colonisation and adding ammonium chloride to feed the nitrifying goodies to reduce cycle time and turn the predominantly base rock into functional live rock.
I always thought that these gizmos were a bit of wank (bit rich coming from an IT guy), but alas, I was interested to see what it could do given the low investment cost. I'd been put off a bit about the lack of parameters it tests, but I was curious.
To be honest, I'm glad I did. I managed to re-learn things I'd long since forgotten especially given my change in cycling method.
I bought the reef model - I was going to shell out and buy the web server as well, but budget constraints stopped that. I do however have a million old PCs laying around. My tank has book shelves beside it, and I put a PC up on top (small form factor, 10 year old box) up there out of the way. It runs the Seneye software; which as it turns out talks back to Seneye.me anyway - so I can log in remotely and see all of the current results, graphing, etc (the mobile app also can give you current readings).
The thing that's really got me excited about this kind of monitoring is the graphing, and watching what is happening.
Temperature - when I first fired up the tank, I didn't have the sump in, so the heater was in tank - the addition of the sump has dropped the overall temp by about a degree. The graphing shows the minor variances each side of its average temps - I love stability when it comes to temperature, so it's nice to be able to see +/- <1C variance being monitored. I used to run 2 x 300w heaters on this system. I've replaced that with a single Eheim 300w heater (about twice the length I'm used to) - so I have quite an interest in seeing how it performs compared to the two 300ws I used to run (though I was aiming at 26C back then, and needed two heaters to achieve it - now aiming at around 25C).
pH - this has been interesting to watch.
The initial cycle resulted in some low readings from 7.89 (overnight) to 8.1 with the lights on. This was while I was feeding ammonia.
Every day after that I could monitor the change in the swings - the overnight drop being a little higher and the daytime high getting a little higher until I've finally managed 8.15~ overnight to 8.3 during the day.
The graphing is really quite handy with this as you see it over various periods to see that the pH has finally stabilized around reasonable parameters.
TBH, I never used to bother looking too hard at pH given it's an always moving target, and far easier to gauge when you can look at its behaviour over the course of days. The Seneye gives me that data so its now more meaningful data.
Ammonia - This has been handy while I was adding ammonia to the system. I did a major dose to get the readings up, and literally spent days watching as it started to fall, then rise as I added more. Eventually I started throwing in smaller doses just to see how quickly the system could deal with it - now to the point its vanished within hours of being detected, and there isn't any nitrite or significant amount of nitrate being picked up by my test kits.
Other - Seneye Me will also show you dissolved oxygen potential and the NH4 levels as well as give you graphing for that information.
The light monitoring is interesting - they seem to suggest that it works with LEDs - I've pulled some PAR readings from it; if nothing else, at least it gives you numbers you can compare to others with LEDs to get some general idea of whether your lighting is adequate. The ongoing monitoring with lighting doesn't have a lot of point depending on where you keep the device - it nothing else, it at least knows when the lights are on and off which might be handy when looking at events in the data.
The Seneye.me site also lets you make notes about events; it alerts you to issues, and you're able to put in notes about the issues it alerts you to, mark them as ongoing or resolved, and add your own notes along the way.
TL;DR - I'm glad I spent the money on it so far. I wish it tested for a lot more than it does (nitrite and nitrate at least would be handy), but still, the monitoring it does do has some value and being able to view that data over a period of time gives you some insight into what is going on. Not sure I can see the value in the web server; I haven't seen anything tell me that it does anything magical that I can't already see.
I'm looking forward to seeing Mindstream hit the market - if it ever makes it (they're back to saying later this year) - it's a lot more expensive, but if it actually works, is accurate and does what they say it does, it should be awesome for monitoring.
If it can provide the same kind of graphing that Seneye does, we should be able to see long term trends in meaningful ways.
General back story - my main system has been dry all year, and I've restarted it. I've done a lot the same, and a few things different - including using nitrifying bacteria to speed up colonisation and adding ammonium chloride to feed the nitrifying goodies to reduce cycle time and turn the predominantly base rock into functional live rock.
I always thought that these gizmos were a bit of wank (bit rich coming from an IT guy), but alas, I was interested to see what it could do given the low investment cost. I'd been put off a bit about the lack of parameters it tests, but I was curious.
To be honest, I'm glad I did. I managed to re-learn things I'd long since forgotten especially given my change in cycling method.
I bought the reef model - I was going to shell out and buy the web server as well, but budget constraints stopped that. I do however have a million old PCs laying around. My tank has book shelves beside it, and I put a PC up on top (small form factor, 10 year old box) up there out of the way. It runs the Seneye software; which as it turns out talks back to Seneye.me anyway - so I can log in remotely and see all of the current results, graphing, etc (the mobile app also can give you current readings).
The thing that's really got me excited about this kind of monitoring is the graphing, and watching what is happening.
Temperature - when I first fired up the tank, I didn't have the sump in, so the heater was in tank - the addition of the sump has dropped the overall temp by about a degree. The graphing shows the minor variances each side of its average temps - I love stability when it comes to temperature, so it's nice to be able to see +/- <1C variance being monitored. I used to run 2 x 300w heaters on this system. I've replaced that with a single Eheim 300w heater (about twice the length I'm used to) - so I have quite an interest in seeing how it performs compared to the two 300ws I used to run (though I was aiming at 26C back then, and needed two heaters to achieve it - now aiming at around 25C).
pH - this has been interesting to watch.
The initial cycle resulted in some low readings from 7.89 (overnight) to 8.1 with the lights on. This was while I was feeding ammonia.
Every day after that I could monitor the change in the swings - the overnight drop being a little higher and the daytime high getting a little higher until I've finally managed 8.15~ overnight to 8.3 during the day.
The graphing is really quite handy with this as you see it over various periods to see that the pH has finally stabilized around reasonable parameters.
TBH, I never used to bother looking too hard at pH given it's an always moving target, and far easier to gauge when you can look at its behaviour over the course of days. The Seneye gives me that data so its now more meaningful data.
Ammonia - This has been handy while I was adding ammonia to the system. I did a major dose to get the readings up, and literally spent days watching as it started to fall, then rise as I added more. Eventually I started throwing in smaller doses just to see how quickly the system could deal with it - now to the point its vanished within hours of being detected, and there isn't any nitrite or significant amount of nitrate being picked up by my test kits.
Other - Seneye Me will also show you dissolved oxygen potential and the NH4 levels as well as give you graphing for that information.
The light monitoring is interesting - they seem to suggest that it works with LEDs - I've pulled some PAR readings from it; if nothing else, at least it gives you numbers you can compare to others with LEDs to get some general idea of whether your lighting is adequate. The ongoing monitoring with lighting doesn't have a lot of point depending on where you keep the device - it nothing else, it at least knows when the lights are on and off which might be handy when looking at events in the data.
The Seneye.me site also lets you make notes about events; it alerts you to issues, and you're able to put in notes about the issues it alerts you to, mark them as ongoing or resolved, and add your own notes along the way.
TL;DR - I'm glad I spent the money on it so far. I wish it tested for a lot more than it does (nitrite and nitrate at least would be handy), but still, the monitoring it does do has some value and being able to view that data over a period of time gives you some insight into what is going on. Not sure I can see the value in the web server; I haven't seen anything tell me that it does anything magical that I can't already see.
I'm looking forward to seeing Mindstream hit the market - if it ever makes it (they're back to saying later this year) - it's a lot more expensive, but if it actually works, is accurate and does what they say it does, it should be awesome for monitoring.
If it can provide the same kind of graphing that Seneye does, we should be able to see long term trends in meaningful ways.
