Apex salinity massive fluctuations

dakoop · Dec 21, 2016

New apex user and my salinity probe is driving me insane. I made sure the pouch was the same temp as water when I calibrated and all was fine for a few weeks. Now it randomly shows super low salinity and I get non stop alerts but the salinity is fine. I even moved the probe and same results.
Ideas?

dakoop · Dec 21, 2016

Here is a graph

Dasidius · Dec 21, 2016

Yes mine does the same thing. If you add chemicals or anything to your water it can go nuts. Also I moved my prove lower in the sump and it acted up. Just pull it out and recalibrate it when it does that. Don't chase the numbers. It almost drove me crazy till I just Recalibrated it.

Kungpaoshizi · Dec 22, 2016

Gave up on mine after awhile. Never read accurately. This goes for the apex probe and another generic non-lab probe. Doesn't seem to make a difference.

msderganc · Dec 23, 2016

It could also be electrical - mine had issues with lights going on / going off etc.

Mikevipe · Jun 9, 2017

Sorry to necro this thread but I thought posting what happened to me could potentially help a lot of people having the same issue.

I have had two occurrences of my probe going insane

First time it was being too close to my heater. Probes were about 8 inches away and everytime the heater came on the temperature change in the water would cause my salinity reading to drop between 30 and jump to 36 randomly. Moving the probes to my display tank immediately solved these issues.

Second time happened to me today and it was a little more hectic. I was dang near pulling my hair out trying to figure out if my probe just went bad on me or not. Had the same issues above but since it had already been working in the DT without issues I was puzzled. A friend gave me the idea to test for stray voltage in my DT.... Sure enough I had stray voltage, this must have changed the way the resistance was read or interference or something. I traced the problem to a bad power head. Once removed my probes returned to normal within 5 minutes.

Hope this helps save someone from spending money and time on recalibration fluid and new probes etc.