Best food mixture/dosing method to feed NPS temperate tank?

As of recently I have been feeding my anemones and sculpins a frozen mixed food. It has a little bit of everything in it and I have fed my tropical reef the same stuff for several years. Largest being mysis, smallest being cyclops.

I have been thawing out a cube a day and just using a turkey baster or eye dropper to spot feed everything and then let the rest ciruclate in the tank.

The plan is to get a couple koralia power heads to place in the tank so that I can kill the main filtration and still have water flow while I feed so that the filter doesn't remove everything to quickly. ( I was going to go vortechs, but cost and 1" of double paned glass discouraged that :angry: )

What I'm looking into now is a way to use the bonus mini fridge I have, along with a magnetic stirrer, and a paristaltic dosing pump to automate what I've been doing manually. Also looking into running some ozone on the system into the skimmer.

So really I'm looking for suggestions on setups others have done, along with suggestions for the best types of food to use.

I found a bunch of info about refridgerated auto feeders on RC and NR, looks like I'll be going with a variant of what Steve Weast did for his. I'll see if I can find pictures of his and others setups for reference.

I'm planning on using either my existing mini fridge, or getting a desktop micro fridge, and hopefully plumbing it into my return lines or setting it up on a small closed loop and using a peristaltic dosing pump to feed into a venturi type line that runs back to the tank. This would be much easier if my tank was a more traditional setup with a gravity fed sump and a pump that feeds the return line. But the tank is more akin to a very large closed loop.

My 27x27 cube tank would be a much better setup to run an auto feeder on, I may end up keep all the NPS filter feeders in there and just keeping larger predatory fish and inverts in the 110 gallon.

So much to do.......so little money

Here's a great thread:
http://www.reefcentral.org/forums/showthread.php?t=1760416
This is kind of what I want to do:


This is what Steve Weast set up

That looks extremely complicated. Hats off to you if you can manage to recreate it.

Brent wrote:That looks extremely complicated. Hats off to you if you can manage to recreate it.

Surprisingly, once you can look at one and know all the parts its amazingly simple to copy Biggest problem I'm running into is the cost to do an exact replica of the systems pictured above. Mostly the cost of the dosers they are using, which is somewhere around $300 ish. I've found a 2 doser system as low as $140. I'll be using an old IV peristaltic pump most likely if I can get a good deal on one.

I'm leaning towards making a small version of the first one pictured, so I wont need to incorperate the magnetic stirrer.

When i set up my tank I am going to build a plankton reactor. plankton is the best there is for any living temperate species vertebrate or invertebrate. Of course that is only my personal opinion

Is it on a timer? I also noticed the title of his thread said continuous? I've never seen anything like this before. Great thread from RC btw.

Dosing on a continuous level with bottled foods (really all foods except live food) is impractical. 1)....the cost of food would be enormous.....2)...you could really never achieve a high enough food density in the water.... and 3)...since these foods tend to knock a skimmer out of action for a few hours, you'd lose your main filtration. The feeding regiment needs to based upon the skimmer's efficiency or your ability to do frequent water changes. I currently feed 3X day automatically.

I was planning on running my setup on a timer that will turn on power heads to circulate the food in the tank, and also turn off the systems filter during the food dosing. Hopefully this will minimize the amount of food that gets wasted going into the filter.

That sounds practical to me. How many times a day are you planning on feeding?

No for sure schedule as of yet, once its running I'll adjust as I go.

Perfect.