About
Built one at a time, on a tank that is running
I am building a reef controller, and my tank is where it gets tested. Every decision on this site was made against a 120 gallon SPS and LPS mixed reef with a 40 gallon sump, and a second, smaller tank that exists to be broken on purpose.
Who is building it
My love for aquariums started young. The pool industry came later, and between the two I have spent my whole life around water and the way it behaves.
Pools are also where I met automation. We were out at the front of it, putting the newest control gear on equipment pads, and the whole time I wondered why nobody was doing the same for aquariums.
Two things changed. The parts got cheap enough that one person can afford to build it wrong three times before building it right. And AI made it possible to be argued with — to have the work read back and attacked from angles I do not have. Neither of those is a second engineer reading the safety‑critical code, and no second engineer has read it. That is the real gap, and I would rather say it here than have you find it.
So that is what this is: what high‑power pool automation does on an equipment pad, brought down to the living room floor. Data and automation that actually talk to each other. A daily journal that works without being maintained. And a panel worth walking up to and touching.
One person, trying to close the distance between a tank that looks fine and a tank that is fine.
Made by hand
The first ones, at leastThe enclosures are printed, sanded, painted and assembled by hand. That is how the early ones get made, and it is genuinely how they get made — not a rendering of a process that happens somewhere else.
How they get made at volume is not decided. Hand finishing does not scale far, and the alternatives all cost something different: tooling money, lead time, or the ability to change a part between one unit and the next. That choice is better made against a real order book than guessed at now.
The advantage of being small
And it is a real oneA part that turns out to be wrong can be changed between unit three and unit four. No molded product can do that. The first run is development that happens to ship, and it is sold as exactly that.
Lead times are stated before you pay
And quoted long on purposeA build time gets published at the point of sale and it gets honored. It is quoted with room in it for the failed print at hour fourteen and the backordered part, because arriving early costs nobody anything and arriving late costs trust.
Why bother
The reason it is built at allReefing has been generous with its knowledge for thirty years: forums, frag swaps, people answering the same question for the hundredth time. This is an attempt to put something back into that, built by someone who needed it for his own tank first.
What I will not do
- Show you a number that I cannot trust. If a reading is questionable, the interface says so rather than rounding it into something confident.
- Let you assume backup power alone keeps you connected. The pack you plug into the node keeps the tank safe. Getting an alert out of the house also needs the router up, and that is a second box. Said here rather than found out at 3am.
- Act on a reading automatically that I would not act on by hand. A wrong number acted on without you is worse than no number at all, which is why the first release keeps the test kit in your hands.
