How realistic is having a tank with vacations?

[Dilan Patel]

What dosing would be necessary for those spans? Can I get away with only alk and calc? Or would magnesium be necessary be needed too?

I dose alk, calc and mag.

 

[tony'stank]

I go on vacation of two weeks duration. I have an ATO with a 32G reservoir in the basement. An Eheim feeder. Battery backups for my Versa return and MP40. I also have two large air stones with and air pump that has an automatic battery backup with power outages. So far I have not had any significant problems

 

[fisheriesdoc]

I do the usual: automatic feeders, dry skim, camera facing the display, and have a friend on call. However, I've handled top off in a way that gives me direct control over how much water goes into the tank. (As a disclaimer, I know I am being unreasonable and an ATO is the way to go, but I'm paranoid when it comes to ATO systems overflowing). I did a little bit of homework to figure out how much water evaporates from my tank on a normal day- it differs based on weather heat or AC runs. So I connected a basic BRS dosing pump to a smart plug* that I can program to deliver the "normal" amount of water, or change manually with my phone. I also have a web cam facing the overflow area where I check the water level. By checking the camera, I can decide whether I want to adjust the amount of water being delivered remotely.

*If you use an alexa plug they occasionally (every few months) get kicked off wifi and can get stuck on or off. I have worked around this by plugging the alexa plug into an old fashioned timer. That timer is set to shut the alexa plug down for 15 minutes when the pump is not running. That forces a daily hard reset with the wifi and has completely fixed the problem.

So there is my complicated, over the top, and probably unreasonable way of dealing with water levels while I am on vacation.