Issues I've had:
- The entire UI in app is barely connected to the unit
- Because of the way they've designed the software in both the unit and the app, they aren't really connected.
- There is clearly some sort of process that pushes updates in both directions in the background, but it may take up to a minute or so for any changes in the app to make it to the unit
- This can actually introduce race conditions and overwrite data if you are not careful and update more than one thing a minute.
- The UI itself doesn't tell you anything about the state of the unit at all, other than "Idle", "Testing XX", "Calbirating", or "Error"
- If you are trying to do any kind of calibration or maintenace, you have to watch the unit itself, and try to keep the app from going to sleep, and time things correctly or it'll just break.
- This lack of visibility and buggy interaction, makes all the other problems harder to investigate and fix.
- Randomly overflows
- Despite recent attempts to fix this, it will still somehow overflow itself sometimes and trigger it's own leak sensor.
- This kind of error is also so badly handled in their software that the whole unit will just shut down and go offline at the same time.
- Randomly goes offline
- At this point it will stay online for maybe a few hours at a time before some fault locks up the system.
- Reboot solves this until it goes back offline again randomly.
- Reagent Tubing/lids dissolving
- They clearly did not test these units for any length of time before selling them, because the original tubing, and even the current lids, are dissolved by the reagent in some cases in a couple months.
- This only happens with a couple reagents, but still.
- Mechanical failures
- The arm that selects dosing tube and source just broke and refused to move about 2-3 months in (on top of the above)
- Support claimed this was my fault and due to some corrison. Then broke the unit while they were attempting to repair it, and asked me to pay $400 to replace the whole thing, which I did.
- I later notcied on Facebook this same issue has happened with many people and is a known design problem.
- Leaking Reagents
- Even buying the reagents directly from them, two of the bottles were unsealed, leaking when I got them and unusable as a result.
- Testing inaccuracy
- At least if all of that works, you get test results right? No.
- The phosphate test with Red Sea reagent seems to oscillate pretty widely, to the point that I'm not very confident in it. I have seen them blame this on third-party reagents, but they offer this as an option explicitly, and their reagent only tests down to 0.1mg/L, which is higher than most reef tanks.
- The Nitrate test is more consistent, but will also randomly show a radically different value at times.
- At least with this one you can be somewhat certain.
- Alkalinity test seemed to be accurate once calbrated (this was fiddly) but then I realized it's just reporting the same number constantly without changing, regardless of the sample.
Some of the errors I've run into were things like it running out of reagent and not reporting that correctly, or dirty nozzles that I needed to clean. These are the responsibility of the user, but even those are poorly communicated in the app, so you have to be constantly watching it to detect if you need to do something.
The reason I'm harsh on it is that the entire point of a device like this is to reliably test your water automatically.
That's the *entire reason it exists*. If it is constantly and randomly failing in obscure ways, and then returning misleading and inaccurate results on top of that, there is no way to trust it.
It's to the point now that even when it does occasionally work (currently rare) I still don't trust the result and verify with my Hanna, because who knows if it's right or not.
If you poke around on Facebook, there are unofficial support groups for all the unhappy customers that have been evicted for complaining in the official support group. People who have paid for multiple units in some cases and still don't have anything that works.
-----
The bugs in the software are crippling, and they seem to have no ability/desire to fix them. They really seem inclined to blame the users for anything that goes wrong, even with the ample evidence that their product is 95% of the problem.
I'm still hoping they can turn this around. But given their history, and given my experiences so far, I'm not too optimistic. We'll see.
