Reefbot one year review

[ca1ore]

Doesn’t strike me as nuts at all ..... quite predictable actually. I toyed with getting one a while back (2019 maybe?) but decided to pass after doing a little sleuthing. Took Neptune much longer than they thought to get trident right - I’m sure some would argue they still haven’t. These small companies just don’t have a good track record of survival. The ‘price’ for being an early adopter I suppose. Maybe RK is still around and solvent - I’d not bet on it though.

 

[richiero]

Doesn’t strike me as nuts at all ..... quite predictable actually. I toyed with getting one a while back (2019 maybe?) but decided to pass after doing a little sleuthing. Took Neptune much longer than they thought to get trident right - I’m sure some would argue they still haven’t. These small companies just don’t have a good track record of survival. The ‘price’ for being an early adopter I suppose. Maybe RK is still around and solvent - I’d not bet on it though.

I going with the mastertronic when it hits the states Focustronic makes some top notch products .

 

[Fishresponse]

Looks like it’s back in stock when looking at their website today

 

[ReefBeta]

Reefbot is $899, mastertronic is 1299. It's 44% more expensive. It's not really a direct comparison. If mastertronic actually works well and good support, you're basically buying that for $400. From this thread, Reefbot sounds like build your own PC, or Ender 3D printer, it works if you take time to tinker with it. Mastertronic is like Alienware machine, or Prusa, that you expect it work perfectly out of the box. But people here seem to expect Reefbot to be the later when there wasn't a mastertronic here to compare. Now with the $400 price different, Reefbot actually sounds more appealing.

 

[rushbattle]

Reefbot is $899, mastertronic is 1299. It's 44% more expensive. It's not really a direct comparison. If mastertronic actually works well and good support, you're basically buying that for $400. From this thread, Reefbot sounds like build your own PC, or Ender 3D printer, it works if you take time to tinker with it. Mastertronic is like Alienware machine, or Prusa, that you expect it work perfectly out of the box. But people here seem to expect Reefbot to be the later when there wasn't a mastertronic here to compare. Now with the $400 price different, Reefbot actually sounds more appealing.

Reefbot can’t be more appealing than anything that actually works. They have totally ghosted me on both of my non-functional bots. @drernesto is running a scam, and RK should be booted from this forum, but we all know what the owner cares about, and it’s not us.

 

[DrMMI]

Just an update, after about a week I did finally hear back from them, but the response was pretty ridiculous. I was told I'm getting inaccurate results because I have the wrong size stirrer....which is the stirrer that came with it. I was told to purchase a longer stirrer. Yeah....that's not happening.

 

[Reef Kinetics]

I looked for them after I read this and I did find their website but the reefbot was out of stock. They had like an aquarium store tester on the site.https://www.reefkinetics.com/product/reefbot/

Hello,
The ReefBot V2 is now available on Reefkinetics.com

feel free to check it and learn about the new features.

Best Regards,

 

[Reef Kinetics]

Just an update, after about a week I did finally hear back from them, but the response was pretty ridiculous. I was told I'm getting inaccurate results because I have the wrong size stirrer....which is the stirrer that came with it. I was told to purchase a longer stirrer. Yeah....

Just an update, after about a week I did finally hear back from them, but the response was pretty ridiculous. I was told I'm getting inaccurate results because I have the wrong size stirrer....which is the stirrer that came with it. I was told to purchase a longer stirrer. Yeah....that's not happening.

Hello,

Please email us your address on [email protected] and we’ll make sure you’ll get the larger stirrers free of charge.

The larger stirrers are used on extra viscous reagents in order to properly stir the solution.

 

[Reef Kinetics]

I may have to look into my setting maybe I missed something with the notification. Thanks I honestly didn't know. Kinda of excited to find this out due to that being a head ache for me

Hello,
Please open the app, menu, my account, and check: allow email, allow notifications

 

[Reef Kinetics]

imagine paying 900 dollars for a product and its not supported anymore that's just nuts!!

Hello,

The ReefBot is fully supported by our company at all time.
We might get a bit of delay in replying to our customers due to the lockdowns.

 

[Reef Kinetics]

Is reef kinetics/reefbot even still around anymore?

Hello,
The ReefBot V2 is now available on Reefkinetics.com

 

[DrMMI]

Hello,

Please email us your address on [email protected] and we’ll make sure you’ll get the larger stirrers free of charge.

The larger stirrers are used on extra viscous reagents in order to properly stir the solution.

My issue is with every reagent I use in two different reefbots. So it's clearly not a reagent issue. I get inaccurate results with tropic marin nitrate, api nitrate, api phosphate, and red sea phosphate. I was told to shake the vials for two minutes prior to running a test. If I'm going to do that, I might as well spend the extra 3 minutes to run the test myself. It'll save me the time of shaking the vials, having the reefbot run the test and give me the wrong results, and then running it manually myself. If the stir bar is really the issue, then why was the unit shipped out with the wrong ones to begin with?

 

[rushbattle]

Hello,

The ReefBot is fully supported by our company at all time.
We might get a bit of delay in replying to our customers due to the lockdowns.

That's just a lie. I have sent emails for the last 4 months with no reply.

 

[HighChiefKC]

Mine has been giving me an error for the past month. I just emailed them. Been to busy to mess with it.

 

[rushbattle]

Mine has been giving me an error for the past month. I just emailed them. Been to busy to mess with it.

Good luck, they will not fix a dang thing if my experiences with $2k worth of their junk is any example.

 

[Superlightman]

how is the v2 against the mastertronic?

 

[Bruceh]

So this is my first review of a product but I felt like I needed to put this out there due to the lack of information on this product.

When I was looking for a testing machine for my reef thier was several things I looked at. One of the man features I like about the reefbot was that I could use several different reagent that could be easily obtained and I could test several different elements. I like the idea of this due to the fear that if the company went under I wanted to still be able to use the product. I also liked that I didn't have to buy a controller or full system set up for it to work.

When I got the reefbot I was super excited and it was easy to set up. Programming the system in the app was easy and user friendly. The machine was a little bigger than what I thought it would be but looked nice.

After I got it set up and programmed I ran a few test and found out that something was wrong with the machine. After watching it try and preform several test and failing I contacted support. Contacting support was easy and again user friendly. To contact support is easily done through a chat box in the app. However, I quickly found out that thier support is not located in the US. I live on the west coast and would not get a reply till 2 or 4 in the morning. So I ended up staying up late one night and found out that the bar that the reagents hang on got slightly bent during shipping and just needed to get bent back into place so that the magnetic stirrer could spin and the bottom of the motor would not get caught on the viles.

After that the system ran smooth for several months with me testing my elements daily. My only complaint at that time was that the machine was loud when it test and it would take 4 hours for me to test alk, cal, mag, and phosphate. I would run these test over night so the length of the test did not bother me much after I got used to the noise at night.

One thing I forgot to mention that took me a while to figure out was that this machine goes though a lot of water. It does require a rodi source and a waste area. I knew this going into the machine but I was not aware of how much water it actually went though. I started out with 500ml bottle for both rodi and waste and found that I could not get all my test in with that amount of water. So I upgraded to a 1L rodi source and a 2L waste bottle. This lasted about a week of daily testing. I will admitted the I now have it running out of a 5gal rodi jug and a 5 gal waste jug. This is due to my own laziness that when I left for 3 weeks for vacation and never went back to the jugs.

When it comes time to doing maintenance of the reefbot by adding new reagents it very easy. I will add that that the reefbot uses 20ml viles but is only able to use about 10ml before it need to be refilled. The system does not warn you when your out of reagents it just stop running the test and you will need to pay attention to the dates your test where ran because there where a few times I thought my alk or cal was good and it turned out that the test had not ran in a few days so when I log in to see the results in the morning I was just seeing the old results.

I have also found that when it comes to replacing your reagents you will need to fully replace the remaining 10ml reagent about once a month or every 2 months. I learned this the hard way. I replacing my reagents by adding a new 10ml of reagent to the vials only to find out (after contacting support again) that the reagent was bad and needed to be fully replaced.

Over the year I have also had one of the silicone tubing tear on me that leads to one of the pumps. This resulted in me flooding a rather large spot in my living room floor because I keep trying to run the test over and over again to find the answers of what was going on.

I have also had the magnetic stirrer go out on me over this time. Again I had to run several test waste a lot a reagent before I just broke down and contacted support over what was going on and have them trouble shoot it. Luckily I was still under warranty and they are sending me a new motor.

Overall, the reefbot is easy-to-use and user-friendly. It does a great job of ot testing and I find the results to be accurate to what I was getting by hand. However, reagents and water is used in large volumes and large waste and rodi jugs must be used. There is also not much trouble shooting you can do on your own for error readings and support has to be contacted often. Support is easy to contact but one will have to stay up late or get up early if they want the trouble shooting done quicker than a single message sent daily. While having several different reagent that was easy to get at the store orginally a selling point for me I find having several different boxes of reagents all in different stages of being used annoying and expensive when half of it gets wasted every few months.

I am not hear to bash or praise any company just stating my experience with this product.

Which reagents are you having success with? I have some posts on this subject. Had some success and some failures with differant reagents