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Sad Day, thanks Apex :x (1 Viewer)

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After the power flash we had last week in Tomball my controller took on add twist. The controller failed to regain communication with the EB8 and instead of defaulting to fallback off, it allowed the heater port to stick on for 24hours, Tank went to 90 degrees, discovered Neptune systems had disabled SMS messaging a while back and I had never had to use it until now :/. Lost all my sps and shrimp and 1 flame angel :(. Everything else was fine but the nutrient spike allowed for an immediate bubble algae bloom....double wammy. Did a 50% water change and a lot of cleaning, tank is looking good and the rest of the corals are all recovering. Word to the wise, setup a backup temperature controller on any heaters that do not have a built in controller. I didn't think I needed to with the apex controller, but I was wrong.

Shameless plug, if anyone has a few stix in the rack they care to let go of cheap to help me rebuild from scratch I'd greatly appreciate the assistance. I don't mind growing nubbins either!
 

mitchell77546

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Damn man. Another horror story. I dont trust apex to do anything but monitor the tanks. I was considering DOS but i think I'm going to sell my units and buy another GHL doser for dosing.
 

TooMuchDog

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Sorry to hear about that. Had similar issue before. An additional, fairly cheap redundancy is to plug your heater (or controller) into a smart outlet. Then monitor the power usage since your heater is likely your highest power usage in the tank so you can see when it goes on and off on a graph. If my power usage stays low or high for longer than normal it notifies me.

For example, I have a 500 watt heater, and a bunch of other things plugged into this outlet. Here's my usage graph. So I can say that the heater shouldn't be off longer than ~12 hours, and shouldn't be on longer than ~2 hours. So I alert based on that. The apex may be able to do that for redundancy as well and even tell you if itself is malfunctioning.

1674224356200.png
 

Cody

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Don't trust any device from any brand on your tank. Anything and everything will fail eventually. Plan for the failures so that when it happens it is just annoying.
This is it right here. Always plan for when, not if, your equipment fails. Have a backup to your backup.
 

Stickboy97

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After the power flash we had last week in Tomball my controller took on add twist. The controller failed to regain communication with the EB8 and instead of defaulting to fallback off, it allowed the heater port to stick on for 24hours, Tank went to 90 degrees, discovered Neptune systems had disabled SMS messaging a while back and I had never had to use it until now :/. Lost all my sps and shrimp and 1 flame angel :(. Everything else was fine but the nutrient spike allowed for an immediate bubble algae bloom....double wammy. Did a 50% water change and a lot of cleaning, tank is looking good and the rest of the corals are all recovering. Word to the wise, setup a backup temperature controller on any heaters that do not have a built in controller. I didn't think I needed to with the apex controller, but I was wrong.

Shameless plug, if anyone has a few stix in the rack they care to let go of cheap to help me rebuild from scratch I'd greatly appreciate the assistance. I don't mind growing nubbins either!
So you had it programmed on the Apex to default to off if the temp hit a certain temp and it didn't? I run my heaters with built in controls through my apex, but have the Apex set to turn that outlet off if the temp of the tank reaches a certain level.

Sorry to hear this, sucks to lose that much from a heat spike!
 
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So you had it programmed on the Apex to default to off if the temp hit a certain temp and it didn't? I run my heaters with built in controls through my apex, but have the Apex set to turn that outlet off if the temp of the tank reaches a certain level.

Sorry to hear this, sucks to lose that much from a heat spike!
Yes, I have the Apex set to control the temp shut off at 79 (79.1) degrees, and in the vent of communication loss with the apex controller the EB8 is programmed to fallback off so should not turn on in the vent communication with controller is lost, however it did turn on which was a failure of the port. Apex confirmed it and suggested I use a different port for the heater fallback :/
 

Stickboy97

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Yes, I have the Apex set to control the temp shut off at 79 (79.1) degrees, and in the vent of communication loss with the apex controller the EB8 is programmed to fallback off so should not turn on in the vent communication with controller is lost, however it did turn on which was a failure of the port. Apex confirmed it and suggested I use a different port for the heater fallback :/
Man that sucks! I know anything can fail, but the apex is set up to try and help issues not cause them.
 

RR-MAN

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Best controller for heater: $35 on Amazon even if you have an apex - this is necessary.


 
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Best controller for heater: $35 on Amazon even if you have an apex - this is necessary.


I heard they suck, but I need something to back my heater up.
 

mittens

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one of my inkbirds went crazy and set off its alarm 3 times a day, every day.. until I decided to replace it. Ranco is the way to go if you want no hiccups
 

RR-MAN

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We expect these cheap equipment to last forever - $50 heater should be replaced
Every other year if not annually. Thats less than a frag. Just saying….
 

soymilk

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Aqualogic are the rancos already made for aquarium stuff right out the box. I don’t remember them being so expensive though
 
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