Multiple WaveEngines without a Hydros Controller

[scolson]

I currently have a GHL controller, 2 Varios 4 return pumps, a Varios 4 skimmer pump, and 4 Octo Pulse 2 flow pumps. I'm considering adding two WaveEngines to my setup to manage all seven pumps, which will eliminate a lot of power bricks and controllers, and then using 0-10V from the GHL to set the WaveEngine modes.

I have two hopefully easy questions:

1. What is the maximum output power of the WaveEngine power supply?
2. Can the WaveEntines be connected and run as single system without a Hydros controller?

 

[Danny]

I am not sure why you would need the collective if the GHL is controlling them. You can connect Hydros units with a buss cable even if they are not in a collective but not sure that would apply here since the power on the wave engine use a different connector for power input. They will supply power to other Hydros control units via the buss. Not sure if you can power a wave engine that way though. I don't have a wave engine so I cannot say what the current output is on the supply.

 

[scolson]

Thanks! I'm actually starting to consider the controller in addition to the wave engine and downgrading my GHL to purely monitoring. I like everything about the Hydros controller family except the wireless connection to the power bars and I think I can work around that concern with a bit of DIY using the 0-10V outputs to drive some opto-isolated relays in place of the wireless power bar.

 

[Danny]

I use the drive ports to run my dosing pumps for ATO, AWC and dosing. Otherwise I am on the power bars. The heaters have their on thermostat if they are stuck on. After the record cold and rolling blackouts we had here in Texas I am not as worried about the heaters being off for a while. The power was off for as long as 4 hours at a time and the rolling blackouts lasted several days. The tank survived without a loss even though it did get down just below 70 degrees at one point. Even though the hydros was turned on and off with the power it came back up and continued with its duty. I do have MP10's with the backup battery for them so they would run during the power off cycle.

 

[scolson]

Thank you @Danny. That's some good feedback. I'm glad your tank survived that!

I may be overthinking the importance of the wired connection to the power bars and maybe heat too.

One of the things I really appreciate about the WaveEngine is that it dramatically reduces the number of things that need to plugin to a power strip and also minimizes the number of switched outlets the power strip needs to control. At this point, I think the power strips in my cabinet will only need to control 4 things: primary and backup heaters, and two UV sterilizers, which could be powered from a single switched outlet. In all cases the primary goal is turn stuff off in special modes or when something goes wrong.

In the last 10 years I've lived through one 36-hour power outage here, it was about 10 years ago. Electricity has been more stable since then, but outages due to trees falling on transmission lines still occur each year, but for much shorter time periods.

I'm doing my best to design a system that can survive a single failure (power failure, pump failure, heater failure, etc.) for 24 hours without intervention because I travel out of the area for work frequently. Having the controller be a single point of failure is one of the reasons I'm considering a set of Hydros controllers in place of my single GHL for control.

A prolonged power outage is the most difficult problem so far. In the event of a power outage, I'd like the system to fail over to battery backup that is capable of running a single heater, a single return pump to move heat from the sump to the tank, and two wave pumps for 24 hours. I'd run the heater in an extended temperature window and the pumps at significantly lower power. If possible I'd also like to occasionally run the skimmer to assist in oxygenation of the water.

I may end up ditching the return pump and just keeping a battery backed up heater directly in the tank.

Still working through the design and math on this, but at minimum it looks like 2,400 watt hours of power which means at least two big batteries.

 

[Danny]

You can hook up a battery backup to the wave engine. This will also keep the Hydros control units hooked to it powered. I think it is one of the Icecap batteries that you use. You can also create a low power mode on the Hydros and select what you want to remain powered up. I might go with this and use some type of UPS on the wifi outlets where there is something I want to keep powered. I already added a UPS to my router and wifi access point. I can also add a UPS to power the Hydros controller that are not powered by a wave engine so all the control units remain powered. Who knows they may come up with a way to do it with a control unit by the time I get around to doing this. Since I have 2 MP10's for wave pumps I have not been in a hurry to get a wave engine. Although it will control them I already have a Reeflink for them. I have had a higher priority on other things for now.

 

[scolson]

I checked out the IceCap battery and it looks like it would work great for my flow pumps but not the return pump which won't run at 12 volts.

 

[Danny]

Flow is the main thing to keep going. When we had the rolling blackouts my return was off for up to 4hrs at times. The two Mp10's I have never stopped but they did slow down while on battery power. My return is a AC pump anyway so it would require a UPS of some kind to run.

 

[JeffB418]

I currently have a GHL controller, 2 Varios 4 return pumps, a Varios 4 skimmer pump, and 4 Octo Pulse 2 flow pumps. I'm considering adding two WaveEngines to my setup to manage all seven pumps, which will eliminate a lot of power bricks and controllers, and then using 0-10V from the GHL to set the WaveEngine modes.

I have two hopefully easy questions:

1. What is the maximum output power of the WaveEngine power supply?
2. Can the WaveEntines be connected and run as single system without a Hydros controller?

Just as a heads up, the WE will control the varios 2/4 pumps via direct drive but it does not work with the Varios 4S skimmer pump. The 4 and 4S are different pumps and the design doesnt support the skimmer version.

 

[scolson]

Just as a heads up, the WE will control the varios 2/4 pumps via direct drive but it does not work with the Varios 4S skimmer pump. The 4 and 4S are different pumps and the design doesnt support the skimmer version.

Thank you. Do you know if the WE can power the Varios 4S and provide 0-10V control?

 

[JeffB418]

Thank you. Do you know if the WE can power the Varios 4S and provide 0-10V control?

Oh most definitely. You can control 4 0-10V pumps off 1 WE. I use the 0-10V out of my WE to control my Varios 8 return pump via the standard reef octopus controller.

 

[scolson]

Oh most definitely. You can control 4 0-10V pumps off 1 WE. I use the 0-10V out of my WE to control my Varios 8 return pump via the standard reef octopus controller.

Thank you!

 

[JeffB418]

I checked out the IceCap battery and it looks like it would work great for my flow pumps but not the return pump which won't run at 12 volts.

I found this from CV Jeremy from R2R:

In essence the VarioS 2 could operate off of the battery but not as you would expect it to. The IceCap backup battery is more designed to manage flow pumps like the Maxpsect and IceCap Gyre pumps. These pumps knock down the power to conserve the battery life. With water pumps like the VarioS they usually require higher power settings and usually under higher head pressure tend to run and draw a lot from the batteries in a short period of time even when used with two batteries. These types of power cycles can also drastically shorten the life of the battery and why I do not suggest their use on such pumps. Thanks for your understanding.

 

[scolson]

I found this from CV Jeremy from R2R:

In essence the VarioS 2 could operate off of the battery but not as you would expect it to. The IceCap backup battery is more designed to manage flow pumps like the Maxpsect and IceCap Gyre pumps. These pumps knock down the power to conserve the battery life. With water pumps like the VarioS they usually require higher power settings and usually under higher head pressure tend to run and draw a lot from the batteries in a short period of time even when used with two batteries. These types of power cycles can also drastically shorten the life of the battery and why I do not suggest their use on such pumps. Thanks for your understanding.

I found this from CV Jeremy from R2R:

Thank you. I think I'm going to experiment with a DIY 24v back battery instead of the 12v Ice Cap backup. I think the batter could directly power the directly power the WE and attached Hydros controller and also power an inverter to keep a heater operable. If I put that heater in the tank I don't need the return pump but I really don't want a bunch of hardware in my tank so still thinking through that.

The down side is the WE will not sense that it is running on backup power because the voltage doesn't change but I think I can use a relay and sense port on the controller to communicate that and hopefully direct the system to go into a low power mode that ramps down the flow pumps and shuts down other non-vital loads.

The larger concern I have is that a 24v battery will actually deliver something closer to 27v and I need to do some more research on whether or not that is going to be a problem for the WE. In that case I might stick with 12v battery and use a DC-DC converter similar to what Eco Tech provides for backup of Vectra pumps.

 

[Jnvd3b]

Thank you. I think I'm going to experiment with a DIY 24v back battery instead of the 12v Ice Cap backup. I think the batter could directly power the directly power the WE and attached Hydros controller and also power an inverter to keep a heater operable. If I put that heater in the tank I don't need the return pump but I really don't want a bunch of hardware in my tank so still thinking through that.

The down side is the WE will not sense that it is running on backup power because the voltage doesn't change but I think I can use a relay and sense port on the controller to communicate that and hopefully direct the system to go into a low power mode that ramps down the flow pumps and shuts down other non-vital loads.

The larger concern I have is that a 24v battery will actually deliver something closer to 27v and I need to do some more research on whether or not that is going to be a problem for the WE. In that case I might stick with 12v battery and use a DC-DC converter similar to what Eco Tech provides for backup of Vectra pumps.

What did you end up going with? I too have a 24v battery backup (100ah) just put online and was curious if you ended up connecting the Hydros directly to it or doing something different. With the extremely low power draw of a Hydros on a large bank (with solar) I don’t see a reason not to connect it directly to the bank unless the slightly higher voltage is going to create an issue?

 

[scolson]

I became concerned that the peak voltage of the fully charged 24V battery might be too high for the WE input so I decided to change the setup to 48V battery and use two 48-to-24 volt buck converters to provide the 24V input to the two WEs. I don't know that 24v batteries directly feeding the WE would be a problem, but I like the 48v configuration better.

When I worked through the math I came up with a total load of 9,000 watt hours over a 24 hour period if I also run heat so I ended up with a 48V/200AH battery. I use an external charger to charge the battery periodically.

Each buck converter has a SPDT relay on the input that is normally energized by the 24V power supply which keeps the buck converter powered down when the 24V power supply is running. Another SPDT relay normally energized by the 24V power supply switches the WE from the 24V power supply to the buck converter when the power supply drops off line. So switchover of the WE to battery is automatic when its associated 24V power supply goes off line.

I use a 12V power relay connected to a controller driver output to turn on a 1500W 48V inverter if temperature gets to low. The output of the inverter is fed through an AC automatic transfer switch to my backup heater.

I have not solved the problem on how to tell the controller collective to drop to a Low Power mode yet but I think I can use a couple of resistors to send a signal of 2.4V to a 0-10V input when power is on and 0V when power is off and then setup my Low Power Mode to kick on when that input drops to 0V.

None of this installed yet because I'm waiting on some additional aluminum extrusions to build an isolated section in my stand for all this hardware. I hope to make progress on this build next week, but I won't really know if this is all going to work until my tank arrives which is still a few weeks out.

 

[Jnvd3b]

I became concerned that the peak voltage of the fully charged 24V battery might be too high for the WE input so I decided to change the setup to 48V battery and use two 48-to-24 volt buck converters to provide the 24V input to the two WEs. I don't know that 24v batteries directly feeding the WE would be a problem, but I like the 48v configuration better.

When I worked through the math I came up with a total load of 9,000 watt hours over a 24 hour period if I also run heat so I ended up with a 48V/200AH battery. I use an external charger to charge the battery periodically.

Each buck converter has a SPDT relay on the input that is normally energized by the 24V power supply which keeps the buck converter powered down when the 24V power supply is running. Another SPDT relay normally energized by the 24V power supply switches the WE from the 24V power supply to the buck converter when the power supply drops off line. So switchover of the WE to battery is automatic when its associated 24V power supply goes off line.

I use a 12V power relay connected to a controller driver output to turn on a 1500W 48V inverter if temperature gets to low. The output of the inverter is fed through an AC automatic transfer switch to my backup heater.

I have not solved the problem on how to tell the controller collective to drop to a Low Power mode yet but I think I can use a couple of resistors to send a signal of 2.4V to a 0-10V input when power is on and 0V when power is off and then setup my Low Power Mode to kick on when that input drops to 0V.

None of this installed yet because I'm waiting on some additional aluminum extrusions to build an isolated section in my stand for all this hardware. I hope to make progress on this build next week, but I won't really know if this is all going to work until my tank arrives which is still a few weeks out.

Fair enough. In my case I can’t really switch to 48v (without several thousand dollars more of investment) so I wonder if I could just use a buck converter to get it down to 24v from the battery. But I also don’t know what the acceptable range is. @Don do you know?

 

[Carlos]

If I recall correctly, anything below 18-19V will trigger the low power mode.

 

[Jnvd3b]

If I recall correctly, anything below 18-19V will trigger the low power mode.

Yes I thought I saw that as well somewhere in relation to the icecap backup which is 12v yes? So you can hook up the icecap to the hydros and it will be 24v when power is on and 12v (battery) when power is lost? Which is where the backup mode will help automate some items turning off in this event. However in this case scolson and I have large battery banks (at least compared to 1 icecap battery) that operate at above 24v, so just wondering do I need to make sure incoming power is below a certain voltage? Certainly there is an upper voltage limit but is it 24.9v? 34v? 99v!?

 

[Don]

At 28V permanent damage to the devices can occur. You pretty much need to stay below 25V to prevent a quick transient from damaging a chip.