hi everyone welcome to my video today i'm going
to show you how to do cheap and easy water top off system for your aquariums. With this system you not
only can automatically drip your water into your tanks you can also make your water change very
easy and almost automatically. Stay tuned we're starting right now. Are you tired of manually top
off your tanks? it's not only taking your time it's also can be stressful for your shrimp.
Every
time you water evaporates from your aquarium it's increasing your TDS and when you top off
your water back to your tank it's decrease your TDS very fast and fast changing in your water
parameters can stress your shrimp. Imagine you're going on holiday for like two weeks, who are going
to look after your tanks? Who is going to top off your water, so that's create some problems for
you you need to find somebody to do that for you, instead of that you can just invest in your water
top off system which is doesn't cost very much. Okay so the question today comes from Steve
Hinrich and Steve asks – I would love to have a water top of system I live in Arizona and I
have a lot of evaporation. I have to top off the tanks at the time before doing a water
change, I'm looking forward to that video. So this video is for Steve and for all you guys
who has the same problem many of you think that autotroph system is very difficult to do or is
very expensive but today i'm going to prove it so it's very easy to do and it's not expensive at
all.
Here's what you need for you for this build: you need a floating valve which i bought on ebay,
it cost me £7 which about 9 dollars so also you need a tubing a quarter inch tubing also you need
few of these valves. One valve comes with your set so it's come like this and also would be
nice to have another two valves if you want to do a water change as well with this
system. I will show you later how to do it also you're gonna need two pumps. I
have here one usb pump and one main pump you can have two usb pumps or two main pumps
whatever pumps you have will do the job and a timer. so now i'm going to show you how to do
it on this little tank example. OK now i'm gonna show you how to install this valve, this valve
has adjustment here so you can adjust the level of the water by just uh move this float a little
bit. I can adjust the level of the water so you you fit on the edge of the tank then you connect
this little tubing, then you connect the valve and then you connect another tubing and then
on the end of this tubing you you feed the T – junction just to make this tubing split into
two tubing one for water change one for top offs then you connect one for water change and one for topoff like this.
Okay i'm going to
show you a quick hack to connect this tube to that tube yeah so you can see it's quite big yeah
and it's bigger size so all we need to do is to use the plumbing tape or you can use insulation
tape if you want, but just I prefer plumbing tape because it doesn't have adhesive and I believe
that this might not good for your shrimp so yeah you can just put a little bit of this tape on this
tube to to make it a little bit bigger diameter. okay we put this tape on this tube and
now it's gonna fit perfectly. Sorry guys this pump seems to be not working you know why
because it has some leak of water through that shutter this adjustment switch here so when
it's under pressure the water coming out through this gap so i have to change it.
So i have
another pump which is little 12 volt pump it runs with this adapter. this is just 12 volt
adapter. So we're going to change this pump. Yes okay just change the pump so this is new pump it's
for water change this usb pump is for auto top off and we have to put this pump which is for auto
top off on timer because you don't want this pump to work every time it will be just noisy and also
create some heat and also use your electricity. So you better to put it on timer and put timer
like i do like one hour in the morning and then one hour in the evening or something similar,
maybe 15 minutes four times a day something like this. so once this timer switches on the pump
starts working so what once the timer is on the pump start working and then start
dripping your water back to your tank and what is good about this this water will
be back to your tank very slowly and you can adjust it by this by just close this tap and open
this up yeah so you can make it very very slowly. and probably about 15 minutes is enough to
topping up your tank a day but just to make sure it's completely full you can put it on
half an hour a day or something like this.
Yeah okay you need to understand that the
one tube is goes to water change has to be closed otherwise the water coming from
one pump will return to another reservoir. so we're gonna change 10 percent of water weekly as normal I do so we drain some of the
water from the tank and then what we do. the next step would be to close this valve
which is for top off system and open this valve for water change system and then all
you need to do is switch on the pump like this and then your water is coming already from
different container – from your water change container which is this orange bucket for us.
yeah so you can see you can again adjust the the flow if you don't want this to be too
fast you can just dripping it very slowly here like this take some time but the the thing is
you don't need to wait you just switch it on and you can do your things and then after that after
one hour you come back and your tank is full.
All you need to do is when your tongue is full just
switch off the pump, turn on this valve and turn off this valve. Yeah i want to mention if you have
more than one tank what you need to do is just to put this t-junction and then connect this
pipe connect this valve and then go to next valve like this. imagine you have another tank
next to this tank so you just connect this tube to the next valve and you can connect as many
tanks as you want. so now i'm going to show you how this system works for my tanks so here in
the corner i have a water bucket which i feel like two days before i do water change.
I fill it up with water with a RO water and then i run the air stone and i add some salt
so the salt can mix fully and nicely and then the water can oxygenate well with an air stone before
I do the water change. As you can see in the corner I have two taps one is open right now it's
for auto top of system one is close this for water change and i have a small reservoir here with RO
water and a pump inside which is connected to my timer.
And two times a day half an hour in the
morning half an hour in the evening my tanks top off with water as you can see this tubing around
to every tank so i connected to this tank and then it goes here and then i don't know it is difficult
to show but it goes at the back, goes to this tank then goes to this tank and then it goes on the
skirting here and then to that tank as well. so this line connected to one system. i have two
pumps in this reservoir i'll show you quickly. that's one and two. Both of them 12 volt pumps.
The reason for that is one pump is for water supply for this tanks and another pump to supply
the water for these tanks on the shrimp rack and then I run the tube on the
skirting board and around the door and it's connected to the shrimp rack and i can show you inside the shrimp rack.
I already have the valve to connect my tanks to connect the floating valves and yeah
so you can see it there as well and top tanks have already floating valves
installed there as well.
Yeah just quickly show you just feeding the
shrimp mischlings from my other video and some unwanted shrimps in this tank. You can see
there's no plants here the reason for that i'm trying to catch all these little creatures called
scuds or something so they're very bad creatures I want to get rid of them but they're hiding
inside the soil cannot put the plants because they eat all the plants. And at the back of the shrimp
rack i made a loop =and then from that loop i just connect the tubing running up and down for
the tanks. you can see it on the screen right now. so you can see of two of my system
connect to one to the same reservoir and this bucket is quite small for that
now because it's designed for these tanks and once i build the new shrimp rack i
need a bigger bigger reservoir bigger bucket. so i'm going to replace it for bigger one same
as i'm going to replace this one for bigger one. okay now guys i'm gonna show you how
to do waterchange using this system.
We drained about 10-15 water from
the tanks and now all we need to do is i have a little switch here so i switch on
this switch right here and the pump starts to work and now i close this valve for RO water
and I open this valve for water change. The same I do here for shrimp rack but i'm not
changing the water in rack right now that's why I'm not gonna do it. And that's it and water start
dripping to the tanks very slowly nice and slowly. you can see it here this is what you want nice and slowly and here and
we got another tank here. so I'll leave you here to watch this and I'm
gonna watch YouTube. I will see you later okay guys we just finished changing the water.
It took about two hours you can hear the the pump is still running and almost no
water left there. so yeah that's it at this point i just switch off the pump with this
little switch i have here switching it off.
Turn off this valve and turn on this
auto top off system valve. that's it guys all done nice and easy. many of you may
be asking me why I don't use the gravity fed system? That's mean putting container above
the tanks and run the water from that container just without any pump. The simple answer
is that I don't want to put the container just below the ceiling at the top level
because I don't have the space here so imagine if I put container here on the top of the
rack that's mean I cannot put these tanks here so I rather to save space for the tanks
and have my container just below here just hidden inside this cabinet and it's nice and
tidy nobody see it.
I don't want to put it just just above the tanks in the corner in the ceiling.
Yeah it's gonna be looking very terrible so that's a simple answer. Okay guys that's it for
today! I hope this video was helpful for you. Please give it a like if you like it and subscribe
to my channel and I'll see you next time. Bye… you.