Using Apex to help monitor skimmer performance?

[WheresTheReef]

For the last couple weeks I noticed my skimmer wasn’t producing as much skimmate. I hadn’t cleaned the pump or inlet in a while. Sure enough the air inlet was almost completely clogged. As expected, after clearing the blockage it started working much better. I started to think about this and wondered how much harder the pump would have been working.

I just took a look at the power usage on the Apex log and noticed that prior to clearing the blockage the pump was drawing an additional 5-6 watts. See the graph below. For reference, I’m running an Avast CS1 recirculating skimmer with a Sicce PSK-1000.

I started to think that I could use this info to try to detect when the air inlet is starting to clog up. The Apex has a feature that creates an alarm when a device measures outside a certain range. I already use this on my return pump to let me know if it isn’t drawing enough power when it is supposed to be on. I thought I could possibly use this to detect when the inlet starts to clog again.

 

Just thought I’d share these steps in case you aren’t familiar with setting this up. This requires an EB832.

 

1. Click the alert icon.

 

2. Click the outlet icon

3. Click the graph icon

 

4. Click on the Apex, EB832, Skimmer until it expands to show the Watts for the outlet. Then click the gear icon on that node.

5. Click Advanced and set the Alarm options. Here I set “Outside Range” so that it will alert me when the power draw is less than 20W when it’s supposed to be on, and greater than 35W. I might monitor the power draw over time and tweek the max down a little. I just don’t want to get spammed with Alerts.

That’s it. Hopefully this helps someone else take advantage of this feature provided by the controller. 

 

 

 

 

[Origami]

Great idea! Let us know how it works out in the long run. 

[WheresTheReef]

The idea above was sound, but the implementation was off. The EB832’s watts reading for the skimmer was too noisy. It got annoying very quickly with the constant alerts with minor spikes. I ended up trying something else about a week after posting this topic. It triggered the alarm today. I checked the skimmer and the air intake was about 50% clogged.

 

First, I raised the max watts I mentioned above to 40. Next, I figured that I would look at the trend of the data and not minor spikes. I ended up adding a virtual output instead. Below is the configuration for it. I kept tweaking the defer time and 30mins for a power draw greater than 34 watts was a good threshold.

 

 

I added this to my email alerts.

 

Here’s the graph of the skimmer watts and the virtual output that raised the alarm. You can see after I cleaned the air intake that the watts dropped back down to its normal range and the alert was cleared.

 

If I get some free time I might add a valve to the skimmer’s air intake to simulate a clog and monitor the power draw. For now this seems to be a good start.