jcolliii's IM25 Lagoon journey - MASTERTRONIC up and running!

[jcolliii]

Just ran a Ca test and came out at 498ppm. The device uses API for its Ca reagents. That's a bit higher than my aquaforest Ca kit returns - my last test with that a couple of days ago was 455ppm, but my ALK was a bit lower that day at around 8. So... because AFR is all three, it makes sense that higher ALK = slightly higher Ca. I'm scheduling Ca for a once-per-week test only. I think probably Mg will be a once per week as well, and I think PO4 will be 2x per week. Still getting weird connectivity issues with my tablet that I do not get with my phone. Might have to reinstall the app on the tablet and see if that solves it.

 

[jcolliii]

All reagent test kits and refills installed, and 1 of each test run and confirmed with my good test kits. Right now, I am testing ALK 3 per week; Ca, Mg, and PO4 once each, and all tests are scheduled for 10am. ALK, Ca, and PO4 are pretty quick - no more than 20 or 25 minutes, but the 3 reagent Mg test takes around 40 minutes. Pretty happy with the accuracy so far.

I emailed Mastertronic about the very loud pump motor and will report back what they say.

I still have two reagent vials left, so probably will be adding NO3 at some point and taking my HACH color disc kit to work for that tank. I don't know though. I actually really enjoy doing that test - it is so quick and so easy to read, and kinda fun to do.

Right now, the other available parameters of interest are ammonia, iron, and iodine - don't think I really need any of those. Now I just gotta figure out where to put it. My ATO reservoir is already on the side of the tank. I suppose it will go behind or in front of that. Figured out the occasional wifi non-connecting issue I think. For some reason, if you don't use the app in x number of hours, it disconnects. So you just have to refresh the app and it connects every time. Right now, my only gripe is that loud pump head. And if I keep testing only at 10am when I am typically at work it's not that much of a problem. It will be a problem over the summer though.

Took a picture of the carousel to post with this, but it is not coming through for some reason.

 

[TheWB]

All reagent test kits and refills installed, and 1 of each test run and confirmed with my good test kits. Right now, I am testing ALK 3 per week; Ca, Mg, and PO4 once each, and all tests are scheduled for 10am. ALK, Ca, and PO4 are pretty quick - no more than 20 or 25 minutes, but the 3 reagent Mg test takes around 40 minutes. Pretty happy with the accuracy so far.

I emailed Mastertronic about the very loud pump motor and will report back what they say.

I still have two reagent vials left, so probably will be adding NO3 at some point and taking my HACH color disc kit to work for that tank. I don't know though. I actually really enjoy doing that test - it is so quick and so easy to read, and kinda fun to do.

Right now, the other available parameters of interest are ammonia, iron, and iodine - don't think I really need any of those. Now I just gotta figure out where to put it. My ATO reservoir is already on the side of the tank. I suppose it will go behind or in front of that. Figured out the occasional wifi non-connecting issue I think. For some reason, if you don't use the app in x number of hours, it disconnects. So you just have to refresh the app and it connects every time. Right now, my only gripe is that loud pump head. And if I keep testing only at 10am when I am typically at work it's not that much of a problem. It will be a problem over the summer though.

Took a picture of the carousel to post with this, but it is not coming through for some reason.

Glad this is working out for you. I’d love to have one but at that price my wife would shoot me, and then she’d look at it and shoot me again.

 

[jcolliii]

Funny mental picture. I think I can actually see the look on her face!

 

[jcolliii]

Extremely frustrated and disappointed with my GHL Mini. Yep, I can control my heater, and the temp probe it pretty close to my NIST thermometer, I can use it as a feed pause, turn things on and off remotely, and get a pH reading. And all of this for only $400 bucks. Accompanied, of course, with the stress of a 3-day long, super user-friendly wifi setup before the brick could even be used.

But couple with all of that, that you cannot:

1. change the names of the outlets in GHL control center; so you might not recall what is on which outlet, and you have to click into that outlet to see the note you made as to what it is;
2. see any history of pH or temp;
3. that you can't even scrape or datamine your GHL Connect site because data are only displayed as a non-renderable non-text object;
4. the firmware update that was supposed to deliver data graphing mid last year has never been delivered, and repeated questions on the delivery of this added functionality have been promptly ignored by GHL reps on these forums;
5. according to GHL, "Compact in Size, Big on Reliability – The new ProfiLux Mini WiFi offers the same top notch reliability found in our other ProfiLux series controllers and is the successor to the legendary ProfiLux II." Would it not be assumed by most people that the successor to a device would have at least the same capabilities of the predecessor device? Like charting, for example?

I feel like I bought a heater controller and a pH monitor in one package with a smart power strip. Nowhere near worth 400 bucks. People wax poetic about GHL quality as well - the four outlet strip is cheap and flimsy plastic. My $25 smart power strips are *much* more robust.

I want people to know exactly what they are not getting with this device. I'd have bought a fuugly Apex device knowing what I know about this thing now.

 

[jcolliii]

Got a reply back from Eric at Focustronic. He sent me some instructions to check and to replace the bushings on the stepper pump that drives the larger dosing head. Taking the pump out was fairly straightforward. I had to remove the syringe and vent needle, put the instrument into maintenance mode which drives the syringe-plunger system to the middle to allow access to the dosing pump head. Took off the wiring harness, undid 7 screws on the rear panel, two screws from the back to get the pump block off of the mount and low and behold the problem: Only had a bushing on one side - still had the mfg screw in plug on the other. So, removed that, threaded in the new bushing (they supply two spares in the package), put it all back together. Started back up, and as it went through it's cycle, the stepper pump was really nice and quiet. Ahhh... now I can run tests after the wife is in bed and won't wake her up (it was THAT loud).

Running an extra PO4 test right now after adding a couple drops of LaCl today.

Still a couple of small gripes: The app seems to take ages (15 to 40 seconds sometimes) to connect to the instrument and to read the measurement history. I still get quite a few 'can't connect, try back later' errors. Kicking the app out of the tablet's memory and rebooting solves it for the most part. One weird issue - was not able to re-calibrate the syringe position after the repair - I had to take the syringe out to get the pump out. Would not let me recalibrate. It went though the process, brought the syringe over the mixing chamber, drew up to where it thought 6ml was (it was still spot on), and asked me to read the syringe and enter it, so it tried and tried, and tried, and tried. Kept giving me an incorrect format error. I tried 6, 6.0, and 6.0 ml. All incorrect format. I really need to uninstall and reinstall and see if that fixes these little gremlins.

Test is almost done - it's doing the countdown right now before the reading. Overall, pretty happy, now that I don't wake the neighbors when I run a test.

 

[jcolliii]

Had a bit of die off on a couple of my colonies just after the rescape - these were probably due to stress, nutrients dropping (NO3 specifically, due to the really wrong numbers that my old Salifert test was giving), etc. So, I had two main goals with the tank for spring break: 1) get the scape somewhat 'settled', and 2) check to see if I had any pesties on the affected corals (bubblegum Monti and slimeball Anacro). I did #1 earlier today - and super happy with how it came out - will get some photos tonight after the sun goes down. I went into the office to use my office scope today, and got #2 taken care of as well (sounds like that bathroom fight scene in Austin Powers when Powers is giving a swirlie to the bad guy while saying "Who does number 2 work for!!!???" LOL.

Anyhow, found a lot of silicious sponge spicules, but I already knew I had some sponges in there. Really pretty to look at under polarized light (used a petrological scope used for geological work). I also found a really neat little foraminifer - not the best photo, this scope does not have a camera port, so did wht the students do and put the phone camera up to the ocular...

Looks like an agglutinated benthic type to me. Know a guy that could probably tell me the species if I cared. Neat to see this guy in there though.

And then I saw this guy. No idea. First thought was some sort of cilliated thing, but I suppose it could be a bivalved arthropod larvae - maybe a bradoriid, something like that. Anyhow, after searching for 30 minutes in the water I dipped several pieces of Montipora in for quite some time and with agitation, no flatworm or nudis to report. So good there too!

 

[jcolliii]

3-16-22 FTS not so great cell phone shot. Colors not touched tho - that set of filters works pretty well.

Still some cleanup work to do, and not 100% on some of the placements, but Iike it a lot - have the minimalist vibe that I like, and the brains will look good spread out on the sand.

 

[jcolliii]

Mastertronic missed a scheduled ALK test this morning. Not related to daylight savings time as other tests this past week have happened on time. Odd. Have to do some digging.

 

[Calm Blue Ocean]

It's here!

What a nicely designed piece of equipment. The dosing heads could be better quality, but they are easy to replace if ever I need one and super cheap on ebay. I might pick up one or two just to have as backups. Weighty, nice build quality, well packaged. Nice bottles and stirrers.

Setup was pretty straightforward as well. I am glad I went with this unit and not another setup nightmare from GHL. I had the wireless up and running in maybe 20 minutes. I ran into a minor snag because I had two instances of the app running on both my phone and my aquarium tablet. Lesson learned. Turned off the wifi on my phone, pointed it to my home network, entered the password, and on it logged. Exactly the way a wireless setup should work GHL...

The setup isn't complicated, remove a shipping screw, three zip ties, insert a small magnetic stirrer into the test chamber, and then calibrate a total of three things. The first is calibrating the pumps that do the rinsing and sample water and wastewater moving. One pump takes RODI water from a reservoir and pumps it into the cleaning chamber, the other evacuates the cleaning chamber, and the third (I think) moves the sample to be measured. I did run into one strange issue while doing that calibration - the app would let me open the first calibration window, but then I could not push the buttons to start calibrating. Weird. So, I exited out of the app on my tablet, opened it on my phone and ran into no troubles there. Really weird. It calibrated up just fine after that though. I was getting repeatable 7ml sample charges. Then syringe calibration - and again, no problems. The last thing to calibrate was the 'stepper motor'
- the larger pump that handles the sampling from the tank. That one is NOISY! I think the pump body may have come loose from the housing during transit, and need to get in there tomorrow to take a look - but need to remove the needles to do that, so not for tonight. I did let the noisy calibration go, and the volume at the end was again another perfect 7ml.

Next was filling the vials and letting the software know which reagents were in which positions on the carousel. That took just a few minutes, but again, I ran into a weird issue. I would save the reagents and volume for each position, it would show them, but when I exited out of the parameters and went back in, they did not appear to be there. But, it appears that I just needed to be more patient. It seems that each time you go into each area, the machine communicates with the internet and then finally to your device - that can take several seconds, but eventually the vials did show back up as kH indicator and reagent. The indicator for the Salifert kit used by this device is only 10ml, so it fills the reagent burette only about half way - the silicone top burettes hold 20ml. I then filled two of the remaining 12 burettes with the kH reagent and saved it all.

Then I clicked the 'perform extra test' button - which means 'do a dang test now already!' and it started up. It does things in such a way to minimize error, contamination, and mineral deposits. First it draws the sample water into the pre-cleaned test chamber, then it rinses the needles and disposes of the rinse water (x2). It then draws up 0.2ml of KH indicator, and adds that to the test chamber and stirs for 5 seconds with the magnetic bar stirrer. It then rinses the needle again (x3, and empties the cleaning chamber after each rinse, refills, and repeats 3x). Then it goes to the kH reactant and draws up 6ml, and adds it one drop at a time into the test chamber while stirring the whole time. When the end point is achieved, it dumps the remaining reactant, evacuates the test chamber, rinses it multiple times, rinses the needle (3x), evacuates all of the waste water, clears the waste line of all fluid, clears the RODI line of all fluid, and then clears the sample line of all fluid. It appears that this was quite well thought out, and the procedure appears to quite nicely minimize any cross contamination between the reagents quite nicely.

My first test was ALK only - I did not manage to add the other reagents yet. But, I got 9.18 dKH for my first test, and of course, I went directly to my Salifert kit to confirm. I got 9.15 from my kit. That is super close, and pretty great in my book.

So, so far, so good. I am happy with the build quality, the care in sample handling, and I really like that there are multiple reagents available for many parameters and that the kits and refills are widely available and not manufacturer specific. Look what is going on with reagents for Neptune's auto tester (which incidentally tests only 3 parameters).

Just a quick one for tonight. But look for more over the weekend. I will try to get some video of it in action doing it's thing.

Now that looks fun! Looking forward to hearing more about it.

 

[jcolliii]

No matter how hard I try, I just can't get a good color rendition on this one. The green is super yellow in person, almost new tennis ball color. And the blue is like fluorescent clear sky. An old Steve Tyree limited edition - I think that man did more damage to this hobby than any single other person. Started the hyped up naming craze. Anyhow, this is one he called SpongeBob favia. Gives you some idea on the time all of the name stuff started. WWC sent this one to me by accident. As Bob Ross would say, a happy accident.

Maybe a slightly better FTS? Maybe...

 

[TheWB]

No matter how hard I try, I just can't get a good color rendition on this one. The green is super yellow in person, almost new tennis ball color. And the blue is like fluorescent clear sky. An old Steve Tyree limited edition - I think that man did more damage to this hobby than any single other person. Started the hyped up naming craze. Anyhow, this is one he called SpongeBob favia. Gives you some idea on the time all of the name stuff started. WWC sent this one to me by accident. As Bob Ross would say, a happy accident.

Maybe a slightly better FTS? Maybe...

I didn’t realize how little of this new scape is touching the bottom. Looks great, I really like that style of scape.

 

[jcolliii]

Thanks, man. Appreciated. I like it, I like the asymmetry and the open space that I can't capture in the photos. A lot better in-person.

 

[jcolliii]

Documenting the issues with the Mastertronic as they come up. Today:

This morning I discovered that my first calcium measurement is no longer in the database of past measurements.

 

[jcolliii]

Nope, I was wrong - the measurement is still there, it is just outside of the current date range on the current chart. Data are not connected by lines, apparently, if the previous datum is outside of the current chart, and no way to look at previous week's data that I have yet been able to find. I've downloaded the data to my computer, and can visualize long term that way tho...

 

[reef_ranch]

Loving your updates on the Mastertronic. I've decided to buy one and now only need to wait until they become available again. I have the Alkatronic and it has the same slow BT connectivity issues you describe with the Mastertronic. Takes a while to connect. Also, it cuts the connection pretty quickly -- to quickly IMO. Other than that, I love having the data at my fingertips and not having to test everyday.

Your tank looks great!

 

[jcolliii]

Loving your updates on the Mastertronic. I've decided to buy one and now only need to wait until they become available again. I have the Alkatronic and it has the same slow BT connectivity issues you describe with the Mastertronic. Takes a while to connect. Also, it cuts the connection pretty quickly -- to quickly IMO. Other than that, I love having the data at my fingertips and not having to test everyday.

Your tank looks great!

Thanks! Overall I like the instrument a lot. I am hopeful that a lot of the user-reported nuisances will be addressed with an update to the app soon.

You may be able to find one out there somewhere. I did a search on google for 'reef supplies mastertronic' - basically looking for all of the big online retailers that carry it. I stopped when I found one in stock. Lucky me, it was from a retailer that doesn't charge sales tax to my state! There could still be one out there somewhere!

 

[jcolliii]

I fed my urchin some leafy red algae yesterday - he's wearing it (and some zoanthids) as a hat.

Will try to get a picture later - he's under an overhang right now.

 

[jcolliii]

Couple from just a few minutes ago.

That Lithophyllon just keeps getting more vibrant.

Torch definitely likes this placement better.

Overall TD.

 

[jcolliii]

Got an Excel spreadsheet set up so I just have to copy the csv spreadsheet data that the Mastertronic generates and past it into a raw data tab on my tank tracker Excel book and my charts will all auto update. Took a bit of work as they are not sorted by parameter, but by date. There were a few ways to do it, but I just used some if statements pasted down 500 rows that check what is in the parameters column. If the parameter is "Calcium" then the resulting cell displays the date and the next cell the result in ppm; if the parameter is something else, the formula puts an #NA - that's important because a blank ("") in Excel is a text string 0 characters long, whereas a #NA is treated as null - nothing, nada, zip. That's important because if you try to auto generate graphs based on those data containing "", you'll get a chart treating them as zeros, making the chart look like zigzags. Took a few hours to get it right, but I just paste the data in and the charts update. It would be better if the MT graphed data over a user-defined interval - hopefully in the next app release, but this works for now. No marker = no measurement for that day. I only measure Ca and Mg once a week. My ALK is a bit high now (just over 9), and because I use AFR, that means everything else is a bit higher as well. Everything should be in a gradual decline with ALK. Not worried about the Mg going up a tad there... the Red Sea Pro is known to be a bit noisier in the MT because of the time interval the instrument takes to run the titration - it is over the recommended time for the indicator used. I know that they are working on that one. Right now the titration starts at 780, but it would be better to start around 1000ppm or maybe even higher. A 'below test threshold' could be displayed if Mg was lower than 1000 or something lke that. Hopefully they get that update done soon.

That early weird ALK measurement was because I did not have the magnetic stirrer bar in the reaction chamber for the first test (woopsy!). I had been feeding roids heavily (why PO4 is just a bit high)... bringing that down slowly.