The Dosatron and Pesatron are two new dosing devices from Elos with a very unique and clever approach to managing reef aquarium chemistry. The Elos Dosatron is your standard three channel dosing pump, albeit with premium components and materials and made entirely in Italy, but the secret sauce lies in the accompanying additive station called the Pesatron.
If you’ve got a passing familiarity with Italian you might be familiar with the word for weight, Peso, which hints at how the Pesatron is more than a holder for your dosing bottles. We’ve seen dosing stations with built in magnetic stirrers but Elos decided that it would be more useful to have scales in the Dosatron to automatically keep track of how much weight is inside each dosing bottle.
Besides alerting you to near-empty reservoirs before they run out, the more important benefit of having a dosing station to weigh your additives might not be immediately apparent. The Pesatron is plugged right into the Dosatron to eliminate the need for calibration of the dosing pump which will instantly know how much fluid is being dispensed by the changing mass of the dosing bottles.
The synergy between the Elos Dosatron and Pesatron is a very cool trick which will keep dosing accurate even as the peristaltic tubing becomes more flattened from use and wear. However Elos has a larger vision for the dosing pump and additive station as these will be app-connected and when using Elos Back to Reef additives of a known concentration you’ll be able to plug in your water parameters for calcium, magnesium and alkalinity and let the system bring the chemistry to your desired setpoints.
Elos will be working with other additive manufacturers to enable its unique stoichiometry features of automatically adjusting water chemistry based on results from ICP or hobby test kits. Elos is truly charting an original path to managing water chemistry and claims that their app will also learn the consumption rate of your reef aquarium to keep parameters to default or customized settings.
There’s a lot we still want to learn about the Elos dosing pump system so we’ll be sure to swing by their MACNA booth in Milwaukee this weekend but we do know how much the entire kit will cost. For now Elos is only selling their Back to Reef system as a complete kit including the Dosatron dosing pump, Pesatron additive weigh station, dosing bottles, calcium, magnesium, and alkalinity powders and test kits for the eye watering price of $950.
No other dosing system has included scales for the dosing bottles but when other premium four channels dosers cost between $400 and $600, Elos will have a big hill to climb to convince reefers to shell out so much coin for the Dosatron and Pesatron. The scales of the Pesatron have real potential for delivering stoichiometric precision to manage reef aquarium chemistry but that will have to be demonstrated by reefers using the system over a long period of time. [Elos]
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