If there’s one thing that aquarists and reefers are really good at, it’s repurposing products and devices to suit our needs and specific applications. We often reach out to totally unrelated hobbies and markets for new gear, but this ‘hack’ comes to us from ZooMed and one of their reptile products, which they could just as easily reapply for aquarium use.
The ZooMed Repticare Day & Night Timer is designed to have one outlet on during the day time, for daylights, and another on during the night for night time lighting and heating of cold-blooded reptiles. The form factor of this particular dual-timer is familiar to most of us, with a simple timing dial displaying the time of day and tabs to be pushed in or pulled out to indicate whether the day or night outlet is activated.
Another way to look at the Repticare Day & Night timer is a dual pump ‘wavemaker’ which we know very well won’t make any actual waves, but it can alternate the switching of pumps on and off from one bank to another. This alternating of power feature is just what is called for the timing of alternating flow, preferably in the switching of mass water movement throughout the aquarium using gyre flow.
The best part of the Repticare Day & Night timer is that it only costs $12 online and probably won’t be more than $15 at the LFS. There’s a whole lot of other applications this sort of switching dual timer could be used for and at that low price, you have no excuse not to experiment with it. [ZooMed]
