IceCap is a brand whose name was once hallowed in the reef aquarium community but which has all but fallen out of public minds since the company was shuttered several years ago. The first hints of a resurrection of the IceCap brand came earlier this summer with the announcement of the IceCap reverse osmosis water purifier but CoralVue has a whole lot more new IceCap branded products in mind for the future. At MACNA 2014 we got a look at a whole slew of new devices CoralVue plans to rollout under the IceCap name in addition to the IceCap RO/DI unit.
The IceCap Ozone generator looks like a really hardy box of ozone generation but the use of ozone on marine aquariums has more than fallen by the wayside. We don’t even know any friends or reefers which still use Ozone even if its water clarifying ability is even better than using carbon. We’d love to learn more about the IceCap Ozone generator, its specs and actual output of Ozone when it becomes available.
The IceCap liquid dosing pump looks familiar as it is a model that has been OEM’d to other brands for some time now including AquaHouse, Tropical Marine Centre and others. This Taiwan-made dosing pump has actually proven itself to be a decent liquid dosing device regardless of who puts their name on it and there’s even a continuously dosing version that is always on and unique in that it continuously doses whatever volume it is set for. The IceCap Smart RO/DI we first heard about this summer faced some initial challenges by using the Ecosmart name that is a well recognized trademark product of Ecotech Marine. Despite that and with a renaming, the IceCap RO/DI does seem like ana ctually “smart” water purifier with pressure sensors, a pressure gauge and at least a built-in TDS meter for incoming and outgoing water purity readings. The IceCap fan of old was a powerhouse of quiet air movement with a DC powered motor that kept that air flowing over our hot halides and hot tanks. The new IceCap fan has the variable speed fan that automatically ramps up the fan speed as temperatures in around the fan begin to rise. Just like before the IceCap variable speed fan comes in a 3″ model that can push up to 60 cubic feet of air per minute, and a four incher that can move up to 100 cubic feet per minute.
The most dubious IceCap release that CoralVue is teasing is the IceCap Smart Aquarium System, so basically an IceCap aquarium controller. We got a first look at the IceCap controller back at InterZoo and we tried to be open minded about it but the non-working prototype looks like its hardware started development ten years ago, and it’s just not clear what kinds of devices this controller might work with.
At this point the IceCap controller is just an idea and like so many other aquarium controller projects before it, it’s a long road to get to production and actual release, and even longer to get to some level of adoption where the ecosystem of compatible accessories makes a device like this a worthwhile investment.