The Plank Automatic Feeder

Dosing System for Plankton

The Plank automatic feeder represents years of our efforts to build a device that both serves the needs of our most delicate and selective aquarium inhabitants as well as our ability to realistically attend to their well-being.  Many reef fish and most corals have evolved to continuously eat small prey items out of the water column.  However, as aquarists, it is usually not feasible for us to administer a continuous, low-density supply of small, nutritious food items in our rapidly and heavily filtered reef aquaria.  This would mean adding small doses of thawed plankton by hand, dozens of times per day; those of us with jobs and a life know this isn’t practical.

Automate frequent, small feedings as often as you’d like

The Plank is specifically designed to allow this type of frequent micro-feeding technique.  We’ve found over years of testing that freeze dried plankton, from tiny rotifers and calanoid copepods to larger mysis and Euphasia sp. shrimp, serve as an excellent alternative to live and frozen food options.  Freeze-dried food is nutritionally complete, often even better than many frozen preparations since there are no preservatives added.  However, it has been difficult to administer to the typical reef aquarium due to its tendency to float for a long time after being added to water.  Even with a simple floating feeding ring, freeze dried food particles usually find their way to the surface and into an overflow box, only to be filtered out before being consumed.  Our system solves this problem by incorporating a powered mixing chamber that forces the food particles to become neutrally buoyant before being allowed to escape.  This results in a nearly continuous supply of freshly hydrated plankton in the water column.

Consistent

Many small high-energy reef fish such as anthias and wrasses, along with juveniles of basically every species, have low capacity, rapid digestive systems.  Once or twice per day blasts of even the highest quality frozen food often isn’t enough for them.  If the answer is continuous availability, the question becomes, how do we achieve this without sacrificing water quality by adding too much food?  In our years of searching, the automatic feeding devices out there didn’t have suitable control of either the frequency or amount of food dispensed, or both.  The common design we have all seen is the tumbling drum that dumps a pile of food into the water out of a flimsy sliding gate that always seems to move itself if you even breathe on it.  Some only offer a few feeding times per day, and if the batteries run out, you have to remember how to reprogram it with the awkward buttons.  Yes, we have a shelf full of these devices collecting dust.

Easy to service design

The Plank uses a precise auger driven mechanism that is capable of dosing micrograms of freeze dried plankton at a time.  Rather than complicate our device with yet another hard to remember programming interface, we opted to offload this to well known control systems like your chosen aquarium controller, a ubiquitous digital timer, or an inexpensive wifi-enabled, smartphone controlled power adapter.  Simply set the timer to run for as many seconds or minutes as you see fit, and let the Plank keep your aquarium continuously fed.  You’ll see your fish behave more as they would on a wild reef, a continuous feeding environment, having brighter colors and vigorous activity.

New v3.6 Refinements

The Plank as with all of the products we build here at Avast Marine is constantly evolving and as we see opportunities to improve the designs they are rotated into production.  

Improved circulation capabilities:

Working with Sicce engineers, we were able to achieve a very tight tolerance mating volute for the Sicce Nano mixing pump. This allowed us to really open up and smooth out the rotational flow inside the Plank mixing tube. The internal output nozzle has been slimmed and profiled to optimize this flow, and the output was optimized to provide efficient drainage.  All this results in a cleaner feeding chamber with less maintenance and more consistent hydration of the freeze dried foods.

Easy and repeatable valve operation:

With dual haptic feedback of positive locking notches and numerically ribbed indicators, The Plank 3.6 is easier than ever to dial in the flow rate for proper soak and hydration times. It is now possible to determine valve position and make repeatable changes all while still mounted and running on your tank.

Easier Assembly:

We all appreciate plug and play gear, the v3.6 greatly improves this experience out of the box and gets you setup and feeding your reef much more quickly.

Improved Surface Finish:

As 3d printing technology evolves, so do we.  We just completed an upgrade to our print farm to take advantage of the newest technologies and bring those to you.  We feel confident The Plank v3.6 is an item you will proudly display on your aquarium!