Fleece Drive setup with Hydros

[HaulinAshe]

After having problems with float switches getting gunked up and sticking, fleece being advanced too rapidly and wasted, and fleece jams causing motor stalls that go unchecked, I decided to ditch the mechanical float switches and drive the fleece motor directly from a Hydros Drive Port.

Float switches don't turn OFF until the water level drops, and that can take several seconds, wasting fleece. With Hydros control you can force the fleece chamber water level to sit at/near the bypass for some time before you allow it to advance. And you can control precisely (in 1-second increments) how much fleece is advanced each time.

Using a single Hydros Water Level Sensor in the fleece chamber to sense when/where the water level rises at/near the bypass, along with a simple custom cable from Drive Port-1 to the fleece motor, this is what I setup...


A Generic output runs a schedule (1-minute iterations) with AND logic from the water sensor input. Schedule ON + Sensor WET = trigger ON

If the water sensor is DRY then the output remains OFF. The output Drive Port-1/fleece motor is only engaged at the 1-minute mark AFTER the sensor goes WET.
If the water sensor remains WET after one fleece advance of 1-second, then it will not advance again until the 1-minute schedule trigger rolls around again.
The amount of fleece advanced each time is controlled by the Run How Long parameter.

Power monitoring with an Orange Alert is also set on the Combiner in case fleece gets jammed and the motor stalls. Typical motor current is 0.4-0.6 watts. I set 0.8 as the stall current threshold for the alert.

 

[John Neuzil]

I think maybe you just tried to reinvent the wheel when you could have just used the Klir setup.

 

[HaulinAshe]

I think maybe you just tried to reinvent the wheel when you could have just used the Klir setup.

Probably, but I'm not familiar with the Klir setup.

 

[HaulinAshe]

I think maybe you just tried to reinvent the wheel when you could have just used the Klir setup.

I looked again at the Klir setup options and the answer is No, I didn't replicate the Klir setup. My setup is a bit more sophisticated because it adds a schedule to the polling of the chamber sensor. That's critical to what I wanted to accomplish.

FYI, my setup is a retrofit for Trigger Systems.

 

[John Neuzil]

Ahh. I'll look at yours again. I didn't see the difference when I looked at it. It seems the Klir runs on mine they way you described.

 

[John Neuzil]

Ok, I see it now. Interesting setup. Thanks for sharing. I'm always looking for better ways to do stuff but not real fast to understand the programming.

 

[HaulinAshe]

After some additional tweaking and timing adjustments, this is what I'm now getting for fleece consumption. I'm happy with the change and confident that if I continue using fleece, this setup will pay for itself in a couple months.

 

[HaulinAshe]

Updating on progress of this...

I discovered that forcing the fleece chamber to run full (in bypass) for several minutes or more, can falsely trigger ATO. So my solution was to add a OK2ATO generic that tests for both FleeceChamber and SumpLevelLow water sensors to be DRY before allowing ATO to run.

 

[Jstephens1973]

Thank you for this. I set my klir up like you posted and getting much less wasted fleece

 

[Jstephens1973]

After some additional tweaking and timing adjustments, this is what I'm now getting for fleece consumption. I'm happy with the change and confident that if I continue using fleece, this setup will pay for itself in a couple months.

can you repost your changes? I'm getting about 3 weeks a roll on my 90 gallon and still seems pretty white.

I'm running it for 1 sec with a run interval of 10 mins

 

[HaulinAshe]

can you repost your changes? I'm getting about 3 weeks a roll on my 90 gallon and still seems pretty white.

I'm running it for 1 sec with a run interval of 10 mins

A couple months ago, I started dosing Lanthanum Chloride (now Phosphate-E) and needed some significant fleece advances during the first 2-3 hours after dosing. I will post a new thread with all the settings. You can see my regular fleece settings in the DirtyFleece generic.

 

[ggdowski]

Interesting. I'll have to give this a try. If I read this correctly, you are more finely controlling how much fleece is rolled out on a cycle. I think I can capture the effect on the ATO with my analog water level sensor.