THANK YOU APEX FOR LETTING ME QUIT THE HOBBY

[akma]

Stupid energy bar decides to crap out day after i leave for vacation.

More than the money, the fact that I lost some little friends of mine angers me more.

BE CAREFUL WITH YOUR ENERGY BAR GUYS.

 

[Greybeard]

 

[Halal Hotdog]

Did you have notifications setup? Was someone 'sitting' the tank? Very sorry you had to lose everything.

 

[Lowell Lemon]

Man has never built anythinng that lasts forever! Sorry you had the experiance.

 

[User]

Going to need a little more info before I go sharpen my pitchforks.

Sorry for your loss, truly.

 

[DarthSimon]

That's a shame. Sorry you went through that frustration. We need to monitor all of our gear.... Hard to tell when something will go. When I go on vacation, I have a friend monitor and feed my fish. I trust my Apex and have faith that it will run, but disasters happen, hardware fails in time.... It's just something we need to be ready for....
Fusion has a great feature now called HeartBeat that could alert you if Fusion disconnects.

 

[Dumaurier7]

Get a GHL P4 next time around!

 

[PlayerUnknown]

^^^^^^ I'm thinking about it myself. Wanted to upgrade to 2016 Apex, but now GHL seems like a better option

 

[Reefltx]

That sucks, I have 2x eb8 classics. Going on a few years now with no problems. *knock on wood

 

[Blue Spot Octopus]

Forget about cancelling your newspaper and having your mail not delivered when you are away on vacation, watch out for Murphy's Law he will get you.
ON a serious note I am sorry this happened to you, it is a sickening experience.

 

[DarthSimon]

This is not a reason to hop over to another brand. We don't know all of the circumstances of why this energy bar died.
Apex gear is pretty much full proof if you use it correctly.....

Leaving your tank alone is your risk. You can't blame it on a piece of hardware..... This stuff happens in our hobby, pumps go, impeller get clogged up, inverts block overflow drains..... Million of things can go wrong out of our control.

 

[tastyfish]

Sorry to hear this @akma, it's my worst nightmare and why I have a tank controller in the first place, so that I can monitor. I hope when the dust settles you can recover and enjoy your tank again.

Hardware fails, so I always try to have redundancy. That said, @DarthSimon under what circumstances would the Apex be able to alarm if a EB goes down?

There is no link back from a DOS unit to state that a pumphead has failed (despite the status LED changing). Would the Apex register that a module has dropped off? Could you provide the code if you have it please?

You could use the heartbeat, but it will only detect a failure of the connection between the Apex brain/head unit and the fusion server. It will not alarm so long as the brain is up and the connection live. So you would need to power the brain from the EB, but then you lose some redundancy and also if outside of the US (ie don't have the EB832) you lose the ability to detect a power failure when running a UPS.

 

[David Taghehchian]

This is not a reason to hop over to another brand. We don't know all of the circumstances of why this energy bar died.
Apex gear is pretty much full proof if you use it correctly.....

Leaving your tank alone is your risk. You can't blame it on a piece of hardware..... This stuff happens in our hobby, pumps go, impeller get clogged up, inverts block overflow drains..... Million of things can go wrong out of our control.

I disagree. It's a piece of electronic equipment that is incredibly expensive for what it is. The quality and longevity should match the price. This is exactly why I dont use APEX anymore. The idea is that it's "cheap insurance" for your pets/corals and fish. The problem is its fraught with issues and overcomplicates an otherwise simple system.

 

[chipmunkofdoom2]

This is probably my main complaint with the sophisticated controllers (not naming names...) available today. Sure, they let you monitor your temperature, pH, dosing pump status, light status, ORP, conductivity, etc, from anywhere in the world as long as you have Internet. Sure, you can set up some really complex alerts to let you know when something goes wrong in the tank. You can even to some extent automate away the risk of some of the more common failures in the hobby.

But what good is this? How much does "knowing" really help? If you're at work and have the freedom to take off for an hour or two to go home and fix the problem when you get a text alert, then it's pretty valuable. In just about every other scenario, monitoring just lets you know there's a problem, but nothing more. What if you're away on vacation and you barely trust your tank sitter to dump food in the tank? What if they're competent, but have never kept an aquarium in their lives? Are they going to have the wherewithal to do something like replace a power strip? What if your controller won't boot up and is preventing some (or all) of your equipment from running? What if a heater failed? Or, worse yet, failed catastrophically and is electrifying the tank? What if the return pump fails? What if your tank needs an emergency water change? Unless you have a tank sitter who is a fellow hobbyist, the chances that they're able to handle all of the above is very low.

I am not advocating that hobbyists be willfully ignorant about their tanks, nor am I advocating against having Internet-enabled controllers. Unfortunately, I believe that by having a controller that sends you text messages when something goes wrong, reefers have tricked themselves into thinking their tank is more protected than it is. If you don't have a multi-layered disaster recovery plan in place for nearly everything that can go wrong when you're away from your tank, knowing something is broken is relatively worthless. The most it will do is ruin your vacation while you sit and think about your tank dying. Once you know there's a problem, you have to have a plan in place to fix the problem, even if your tank sitter knows nothing about your tank.

I am sorry for your losses @akma. I don't mean to beat up on you with this post. It's just getting to be vacation time again. With more and more people leaving their tanks unattended, we need to realistically assess what can go wrong and how to fix it if you're away from the tank for long periods.

 

[CODE3EMT]

As an Apex user myself, I can say this. I really only use my Apex to operate my Vortechs, and notify me of any leaks. I find that I use it more as a fancy on/off switch for my gear. I do all my own testing, and dose manually. Some of the most beautiful tanks I’ve seen use nothing more than a trusty power strip plugged into a GFCI outlet. IMO, things like this are bound to happen when we put this much complexity into a fish tank.

 

[Leadfooted]

Man has never built anythinng that lasts forever! Sorry you had the experiance.

Mount Rushmore's going to put up a good fight to hang around for a while

 

[kz4q66]

Nothing last forever. Expensive equipment are more reliable and have more features but it will fail at some point.
Very sorry for you lost. Nothing perfect and equipment do fail when we need them at the most. Do not give up the hobby.

 

[ca1ore]

This is not a reason to hop over to another brand. We don't know all of the circumstances of why this energy bar died.

Fully agree! Just saying something failed is not useful. Why did it fail? What caused it to fail? Did it rust, get splashed, GFCI tripped? That's useful in trying to avoid the same problem in the future - either for the OP or for somebody else. I've certainly had my fair share of Apex issues, but not with the energy bars - they have been rock solid.

 

[Dumaurier7]

Fully agree! Just saying something failed is not useful. Why did it fail? What caused it to fail? Did it rust, get splashed, GFCI tripped? That's useful in trying to avoid the same problem in the future - either for the OP or for somebody else. I've certainly had my fair share of Apex issues, but not with the energy bars - they have been rock solid.

I fully disagree! as an ex Apex owner / user I can say that the system is unreliable and poorly designed. I have had every issue with mine only to be told to use their support because it’s soo good! But I’d like to not have an issue so I don’t have to use their fabulous support system ! The EB8 is the final control element which means it must be pretty robust and dependable! There is no point to having a fancy computer if this part is bad!
My GHL has not had one single issue since I installed it which is over a year ago! I have gone on two vacations since experienced multiple power outages and it continues to purr along just like the first day I installed it. I have COMPLETE confidence in the system and I believe it’s well placed!

 

[Jason Collins]

Mount Rushmore's going to put up a good fight to hang around for a while

Technically did man build Mount Rushmore? Didn't we just blow up and carve a mountain side? So man didn't technically "Build it?"

Just food for thought.... for another discussion lol