Accidentally Left Lights on / Why Aquarium Controllers may be important?

[Ksull72487]

Well guys I’m using a fairly basic setup here for my 13.5G. Found a nice ramp up timer that worked with the stock light which allows me to have different intensities through out the day. I went manual full on 2 days ago for some tank maintenance. Just today I noticed it was manually on. Shocked my Elegance and bubble pretty good.

Knowing what’s going on with your tank at all times is a huge deal.

Aquarium Controllers and WiFi would of helped me a ton with this. Sometimes the basic way or cheaper way isn’t always your best option.

Corals will be fine. It’s just lights out till tomorrow.

Initially when I built this set up I wanted the tank to have some type of automation and redundancy but didn’t want to break the bank.

I’m a believer in WiFi and Aquarium Controllers after this.

Sorry it’s not really an emergency as I know the corals will be fine. It’s not a high intensity light their just gonna need some rest. Curious if anyone knows of a budget WiFi aquarium controller? I’m kinda re considering that idea.

 

[Brett S]

I’m a huge fan of automation and I love my apex, but to be honest I’m not sure that really would have helped you here. I certainly don’t have any alerts set up that would warn me if I accidentally left my lights on and I suspect no one else does either. It is something that could be set up with the apex, but it’s not something that most people would have configured.

The other thing that you could do with a controller is set up a timed maintenance interval. Have it turn your lights on for, say, 1 hour and then automatically switch back to the regular programming after that, so that way you don’t have to remember to switch back. But again, this isn’t something that I have configured and I don’t believe it would be a common thing to set up either.