Seneye Ammonia monitoring. Useless for the established tank? I think not.

jason2459 · Jul 23, 2016

I picked up a used seneye and have it running now for the last couple days. Just something to play with and primarily got it for the par meter on it. I haven't tested that out yet.

Temp has been reading consistently about 2 degrees F lower then my Apex and digital thermometer I have all next to each other. pH has been pretty well tracking and the same as the Apex. Temp isn't a big deal as I can mentally note the differences and calibrate in my head. Plus, I have many things checking and controlling temp (Apex, Ranco, built in heater thermostats, digital thermometer, and now the seneye.)

The Seneye also tracks ammonia. Many say this is only useful for new tanks or QT and many established tank owners dismiss the seneye as not very useful. About 2 years ago I think it was my tank took a turn for the worse due to some mold mildew cleaner spray getting into it (not by me...). It lead to practically all inverts dieing and several fish deaths which I think was most likely caused by ammonia spikes from the invert deaths.

If the seneye was monitoring it would have alerted me to the tank going downhill and I may have been able to save some of those fish before the ammonia spiked to high. Probably not the inverts.

Now I don't think manual ammonia or nitrite testing is very useful at all for the established tank but the constant monitoring from the seneye and it's cloud capabilities of alerting you via email and text I found could be very useful. I hope I never need it again but it's like insurance isn't it especially since the seneye requires slides to be replaced every 35 days to monitor pH and ammonia. Plus side is that each slide renewal is recalibrating itself.

I've also flound it very interesting to see my ammonia goes up to 0.01ppm and back down to 0.001ppm every day with a steady up swing through out the day to midnightish and a steady down swing after that. At some point I will look at the trends and see what it coordinates with.

Some side by side screen shots of the two.

Would be nice to see seneye develop this further like the mindstream and keep costs down for the consumables.

Joeganja · Jul 24, 2016

Ammonia would be more towards a freshwater tank which seneye originally was used for. So they basically took the same design and threw it into a reef with pH and temp and ammonia. But usually most if not all already set up and established aquariums don't need to be tested for ammonia unless your mixing a deep sand bed, have a lot of fish and they poop a lot and you have high nitrates, poor circulation

jason2459 · Jul 24, 2016

That is the typical thought. And I agree normally an established tank does not have to worry about ammonia. But there are times in a tanks life where normal doesn't happen.

Joeganja · Jul 24, 2016

jason2459 said:
That is the typical thought. And I agree normally an established tank does not have to worry about ammonia. But there are times in a tanks life where normal doesn't happen.

Well I don't know any aquarist that tests for ammonia who has an established tank. Ever. But seneye has to have their ammonia cards or whatever they are to check ammonia replaced every so often and they aren't cheap. I guess it's your choice if you wanna test or not.

jason2459 · Jul 24, 2016

I think you've missed my point. Both of those points you just brought up are in my original post.

kennedpa · Sep 24, 2016

No such thing as testing too many parameters when you're going for a perfect habitat.. Especially when they can say ... dude there's a problem for you to take care of when you get home.

kennedpa · Sep 24, 2016

How are you liking the Seneye?

jason2459 · Sep 25, 2016

kennedpa said:
How are you liking the Seneye?

Works well. I still haven't had the chance to use the par features of it. It is really good at ammonia monitoring. At least it seems like it. I can notice a larger increase in ammonia when I feed more but it has to be feeding more over several feedings. If I feed more in just one feeding the normal ammonia raise and lowering each day doesn't seem to be effected.

kennedpa · Sep 26, 2016

Cool, I'm interested to get one. I know people think it's bogus on a mature tank but little disturbances can cause a spike. Melev's reef (I can't believe I forget his name now, ) was working on a continuous alkalinity monitor and showed that just small disturbances caused a growth stunt for 24-48 hours where he had to shut his reactor off. I have a 40 gallon long right now jam packed with frags for the new system we'll be putting up. I too observed this since I had seen that and knew to look for it. I had to shutdown my reactor also for this. My KH rose by almost one before I caught it. You obviously have changes, which makes sense since the fish are active during the day time and burning energy, but it's those other moments like death or the oh s$!t moments I think this would be good for. Like ORP monitoring. I would take a guess to say that ORP and NH4 might correlate during those times.

jason2459 · Feb 21, 2017

Oh man, I just did the software upgrade to v2 for the SCA. It's awesome. It added out of water alerting and along with PAR and LUX it includes now PUR as well. That's an awesome value.

Who knows if its accurate but should be good enough for tracking and matching purposes and with BRS testing the PAR readings being better at LEDs then the older 200 series Apogee and the newer Apogee 500 series being slightly better the seneye is a great value just for being a light meter.

Going to put this in my return section now for a backup ATO has failed alert. No slides needed for that fyi.

camaroerik21 · Feb 22, 2017

You can now also adjust the temperature and Ph to match other calibrated devices you may have.
Under settings is a trim to make adjustments.

drukyulgoods · Feb 22, 2017

I've been running a Seneye for a year now in my 160g heavily stocked reef tank. Ammonia monitoring is interesting. The Seneye in the advanced section monitors both NH3 as well as NH4. I was surprised to see my NH4 levels being high. All of the testing kits out there rarely picked up these NH4 values. It took several months of work to get these values down with the culprit being the sand bed. Staged extensive cleaning over the months were required so as not to disturb other parameters.

TbyZ · Feb 22, 2017

jason2459 said:
I've also flound it very interesting to see my ammonia goes up to 0.01ppm and back down to 0.001ppm every day with a steady up swing through out the day to midnightish and a steady down swing after that.

That bit of info alone made this OP worth reading!
Thanks