Apex to home assistant update today

[A_Blind_Reefer]

Just fyi if you have been using the apex home assistant integration in hacs, communication stopped today. There is a hacs integration update that just came out to fix the now deprecated async and bring communication back.

Funny thing is I have some automations through home assistant for my apex that were not happening today. I kept hearing my skimmer run for awhile, shutdown, run for awhile, shutdown, no alarms through fusion (I had a 7min defer and the issue resolved before the 7mins was up and kept cycling), and no lights in the house or messages (through home assistant) to indicate an issue.

Nothing major, but a perfect storm of my skimmer voltage being low enough to trigger a shutdown. I run ozone into the skimmer so when it’s not pulling enough air I have it shutdown the skimmer and ozone via the apex. With the defer, the skimmer would kick back on before an alarm generated and run for awhile until the voltage dropped below the set point and repeat. I have automations in home assistant that will notify me of certain things such as this, but nothing happened as the apex integration was down.

Took me awhile to go through the motions to figure out why 2+2 wasn’t equaling 4. I’m a bit slow these days. So, my bright idea of having a failsafe secondary notification system through home assistant isn’t so failsafe after all.

I guess I need to come up with a heartbeat notification through home assistant now.

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Thanks for sharing!

 

[A_Blind_Reefer]

Thanks for sharing!

Yeah, I’m not sure how many people are running home assistant and apex….probably not a lot but I figured I might as well post up just incase.

 

[Tlovely]

I suspect this may be my first stop on a long and rocky path but..... I have an APEX and a few dousers in unopened boxes. build my dream take has been on hold way to long and now I'm thinking about using home assistant to implement automation. I'm thinking for reselling the apex and moving to commercial off the shelf as much as I can. I'd be curious to hear what you think, is this madness?

 

[A_Blind_Reefer]

I suspect this may be my first stop on a long and rocky path but..... I have an APEX and a few dousers in unopened boxes. build my dream take has been on hold way to long and now I'm thinking about using home assistant to implement automation. I'm thinking for reselling the apex and moving to commercial off the shelf as much as I can. I'd be curious to hear what you think, is this madness?

My experience with Neptune apex gear is that it just works. Yes, I had the sd card failure (same has happened with raspberry pi stuff) but it was quickly resolved. I also had a slew (and by slew I mean a lot, many, at least a dozen) wav pump failures. Again, resolved quickly up until a few years back when they were discontinued. I totally rely on this gear being blind as a bat and having tremors with mobility issues now. My tank would not have survived, and would not be up and running now but for my apex gear.

Am is total fanboy? No, not at all. It’s just been my personal experience. Others may have experienced the complete opposite.

Now, with that, I’ve always been a tinkerer and love diy. So going that route could be a lot of fun. I would just keep the expectations that (for most) it’s a living, breathing organism that requires occasional maintenance, upkeep, or tweaking. There are a few pi based (open source, and otherwise) controllers out there. Some include arduino gear as well. All fun projects to keep the ol noggin working.

Me personally, if I had the apex gear on hand already I’d run it. You can run diy projects on top and tie it all together with things like home assistant. But I’m not you, and you aren’t me. We likely have completely different priorities.

I think you’ll find that used apex gear (nib or high mileage) won’t fetch all that much when trying to sell it. Although, who knows…. As the saying goes, there’s a sucker born every minute.

 

[areefer01]

Just as an aside can't you tell HA to not update? I've only recently started to use it, not with Apex, but ran into a issue with a similar issue and Unify. Frustrated the heck out of me. Once that happened I did not go any further into the use of HA.

With regards to Neptune Apex I use telegraf and Grafana. So not doing any automation per say but rather data retention, visualization, and secondary alerting.

 

[A_Blind_Reefer]

Just as an aside can't you tell HA to not update? I've only recently started to use it, not with Apex, but ran into a issue with a similar issue and Unify. Frustrated the heck out of me. Once that happened I did not go any further into the use of HA.

With regards to Neptune Apex I use telegraf and Grafana. So not doing any automation per say but rather data retention, visualization, and secondary alerting.

Well, you can skip it. I mistakenly thought it was an update for the apex integration on home assistant, not an update for the apex itself. Kinda weird (in my mind) that you would get a home assistant update message (on the home assistant settings page). I got the home assistant message before the fusion app notification even. Lesson learned.

It’s amazing what can be done with assistant! I use it for notifications as the fusion push notifications are unreliable for me. It also tracks consumption by historical data and reminds me to order things before I run out. I’m currently working on adding tds monitoring for the rodi system to alert me when to change resin as I can’t really see to tell and can’t read the meter that came with the rodi unit, even using my camera and ai…. The display is just too small. Plus I rarely go into the garage and the rodi system is automated so I never touch it.