Hey all, this has been a great thread to read through and I’ve picked up some good tips along the way. Just so you know you’re not the only crazy ones out there, I also control my 2 small aquariums (one 40 gal fresh, one 15 gal nano reef) with a combination of Home Assistant (which also takes care of my apartment) and Reef-Pi. If you havn’t looked into Reef-pi please do (https://reef-pi.github.io) - the development has come a long way in the past year. It’s pretty easy to add temp and relays and everything is published via API, which is easy for a remote Home Assistant installation to pick up.
I went for a slightly different goal with my controllers - I wanted the tanks to mirror specific locations as much as possible. For example, I’m querying various sites to get daily water temp data. Through automations, the reef water temp changes daily accordingly, dropping to lower averages at night, and higher at midday depending on the data coming from a reef in Bali. Same with sunrise / sunset times controlling the lighting and high/low tides controlling the wavemaker at that specific location. The freshwater tank is setup in a similar way, but targeted to a spot in the Amazon River instead. (Amazon water temp data is hard to find so I had to go with monthly averages.)
Improvement has become a never-ending project but I think it’s pretty cool so I wanted to share…
