How to handle my CPP2?

Hallo,

I bought a CPP2. I've studied the manual thoroughly, but there remain two questions to be answered.

Can the troughs be filled via the cold water solenoid or must I poor the needed amount of water in. Are the two troughs filled in one go or separately?

The manual says about the 'Pump/Heat Switch': The processor will not heat if this control is off.
I normally develop my APX100 and HP5+ films in Rodinal 1+50 at 16°C (~61°F) which will ask for cooling the process. Has the switch to be on or off in this case?

Thanks

Hello Luxikon

I have (and love) the CPP2. In my case, I keep it under my sink when I am not using it, and bring it out when processing film, so I am filling the bath each time. If I am processing B&W - which is what I do most of the time, then I fill the bath with water from my tempered water tap, since this is quick, and it doesn't take long for the bath to stabilize at the 20C temp that I use for processing.
There is an overflow thing, so you can fill the bath fairly full, and then when you put the bottles of processing chemicals in, it will drain down to the proper level.

Once the bath is mostly full, I turn on the pump/heat switch.

If you process at 16C, then you need to make sure that your cold water inlet is at a temp below 16C for the cold water solenoid to work to cool the process down. In the summer time this might be an issue, depending on where you are. If so, one thing that I will do is to take a 1L bottle and fill it with ice, and put that in the bath, well away from my developer bottle, this helps to keep the bath cold. You will have to replace ice bottles if you are doing several runs one after another.

I suppose that you are using an unusually low temp of 61 degrees for a specific reason. If not, then a warmer temperature would be much easier to maintain. I have never hooked up the cold water solenoid because I use the CPP only occasionally for roll film and thought the solenoid was too much trouble. For your purposes it might be a good solution if your intake water is cold. Most ground water hovers around 58 degrees I think so you might have a hard time cooling in the summer. I would second the bottles of ice suggestion.

I used to fill the unit with water through the cold water solenoid, but it is slow. Now I use a separate hose for filling.

When the "Pump/Heat" switch is ON it will turn off the heater and turn on the cold-water solenoid at the appropriate time.

16C is pretty cold. I tried that once and needed quite a bit of ice, as my tap water is only 20C. I had to fill all 6 bottles with ice and continued sequentially changing them out every 10 minutes until I reached 16C. It was a big deal. (there was a url link here which no longer exists)