Litermeter III for ATO is pretty darn fool proof. Feeding the fish takes two seconds I just drop some pellets in on weekdays. Adding ro/di is quite a bit more work. That gets done on Sunday withe the rest of the weekly maintenance tasks.
there can be only so much you can do to keep things simple in a reef...
alof of the automated devies is to make life easier so you can enjoy the tank.....
.im not gonna say you cant top off manually....but thats where you come up with a post about your return section evaporating too fast...
with a quality ATO kit...you will not notice that evap as much...you only gonna see your resevior getting lower by the day and then you just add rodi water to it probly once a week...
i used to manually top off too...but im so much happier not having to do that everyday....
i dont know about the 2 reefers you seen with malfunctioning ATO's...thats 2 out of thousands of members so far...and who knows how they have thiers setup...you notice a few members have thier system crash...but look at all the quiet ones that never had a problem with thier ATO's
like i said...show us some pics of your system or its a guessing game
