THANK YOU APEX FOR LETTING ME QUIT THE HOBBY

[rkpetersen]

My apex could die tomorrow, and while it would be inconvenient, it would not be catastrophic

Same here, but it would definitely cause me to break out in a cold sweat when I realized the situation.

 

[Mark Gray]

Same here, but it would definitely cause me to break out in a cold sweat when I realized the situation.

Same here I would not like it the amount of extra work would be a lot. I think the Apex haters maybe young and not understand the advances in technology I think my first salt water tank was like 1972 or 73 never thought I needed a controller until I tried one now I don't think I will run without one. Makes things so much easier

 

[ca1ore]

I think the Apex haters maybe young and not understand the advances in technology

Or they put too much 'trust' in technology and feel 'betrayed' when it fails them ........

 

[jda]

When you trust technology too much...


At least our corals do not eat us when our tech fails... that would make you rethink using hobby-grade stuff.

 

[ZaneTer]

The truth of the matter is that APEX and GHL are really only hobby grade equipment. I can guarantee if you asked the owners to live in a sealed box controlled by their equipment they would refuse.

 

[DesertReefT4r]

Having a controller is a very nice upgrade to have on a reef tank. Its not required by any means though. It can also be over complex, cause issues and relying on it for too much can be a bad thing if it fails. Personally I would not have a reef tank without a controller. I dont rely on my controller for everything but it does do a lot. Heater, fan, lights, ph and temp monitoring, feed mode for skimmer and its also my ATO. It turns my lights on and off daily and off if temps get too high which is a nice safety feature, turns my heater on if needed and is a level of safety if there is an issue with the heater. Turns on a fan over my sump if temps get a high. Using a float switch my control runs a pump for ATO. Along with the programed safety features my controller also reduces the clutter and need for several power strips, timers, ATO and heater controller. I used an old school Reef Keeper Lite that I pieced into a Lite Plus for under $100. Its simple, cheap, and it has worked for me very well on 3 different tanks. It would be nice to have email or text alerts if an alarm is tripped but as others have posted, if you are away being alerted does not mean you can do anything. There are pros and cons to controllers and anything man made will break in time.

 

[tiggs]

The truth of the matter is that APEX and GHL are really only hobby grade equipment. I can guarantee if you asked the owners to live in a sealed box controlled by their equipment they would refuse.

I think this is a very important point that a lot of people miss. Apex and GHL make the best controllers by far, but both aren't anywhere near enterprise grade equipment and we shouldn't be shocked that they fail. In fact, nobody should be surprised that anything fails. I work in the IT field and deal with gear that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and guess what, it fails occasionally, nobody is surprised, and our entire system isn't lost in the process. This is because we have these types of situations factored into the design, so everything is built with failsafes and redundancy.

The same should be done with our reefs and no single piece of equipment failing should ever wipe everything out. With controllers, everyone is looking for this magic machine that makes our lives easier, but so many people fail to add measures that'll prevent a disaster. ATO stuck on and it wiped out your tank? Well, you can easily have a function that kills power to the outlet if the salinity drops by a certain amount. Doser stuck on and dumped an entire liter of alk into your tank? You can easily have something in place that shuts off power to the doser if ph swings by too much. Entire controller fails and it kills all power resulting in a complete loss? Well, most major pump manufacturers offer a battery backup that'll keep a single pump operational for days (in some cases) for less than $200. For those that don't, you simply buy a decently sized computer UPS and keep one of your pumps completely separate from the controller.

I'm definitely not trying to shift blame to hobbyists for these types of situations or anything like that, but I personally think more of the marketing and documentation for controllers (and other gear) should be focused on disaster prevention than we currently see. Folks buy these expensive controllers and have this false sense of security that it'll protect their prized possession forever and that's simply not the case. All equipment eventually fails or has issues, so when it does, it's important to have a failsafe measure in place.

 

[Mark SF]

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.

I'm really having trouble following this logic. If you mean to say that added complexity takes away from the hobby, I would agree with you, and that is an entirely different debate. If you're simply stating that technology that gives you the CHANCE to address an issue is somehow tricking reefers is just crazy talk. Ignorance is not bliss in this hobby, at least in my opinion.

All of your scenarios above should be EXPECTED outcomes, this is hobby grade equipment on a hobby grade budget, after all. Playing the "what if" game is pointless if there's nothing to prepare you for it...And, I would argue that it is not "what if" something happens but "when" all of the above issues happen. For me, I'd like to know, on vacation or not, and be given a chance to be resourceful to save the system.

-Mark

 

[chipmunkofdoom2]

I'm really having trouble following this logic. If you mean to say that added complexity takes away from the hobby, I would agree with you, and that is an entirely different debate. If you're simply stating that technology that gives you the CHANCE to address an issue is somehow tricking reefers is just crazy talk. Ignorance is not bliss in this hobby, at least in my opinion.

All of your scenarios above should be EXPECTED outcomes, this is hobby grade equipment on a hobby grade budget, after all. Playing the "what if" game is pointless if there's nothing to prepare you for it...And, I would argue that it is not "what if" something happens but "when" all of the above issues happen. For me, I'd like to know, on vacation or not, and be given a chance to be resourceful to save the system.

-Mark

I never said that ignorance is bliss. I even wrote in my original post that I'm not advocating that hobbyists be willfully ignorant:

I am not advocating that hobbyists be willfully ignorant about their tanks, nor am I advocating against having Internet-enabled controllers.

I said people put far too much stock into knowing that there's a problem, and that simply knowing you have a problem is not enough. I'm fully aware that all of the scenarios above are expected outcomes with hobby-grade materials and equipment. This is why I have a literal written disaster plan on paper should anything go wrong in my tank, as well as common replacement equipment (1x heater, 1x return pump, impellers, power supplies, etc) sitting in my closet waiting to be used.

Knowing that something goes wrong is nice, but it's no substitute for having a plan and parts on-hand. Being resourceful is all well and good, but unless you live close to a LFS (which, by the way, only 1/3 of R2R members live within 5 miles of a LFS) and have an exceptionally skilled tank-sitter with a lot of time to burn, it might not get you very far. I still believe that unless you have a plan, knowing that something has gone wrong is of relatively little value.

 

[ca1ore]

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I monitor just about everything on my tank; on the other hand, probably 75% of the alerts I get are false positive and another 15% things that require no intervention. Is all that 'noise' worth the one-out-of-ten where automation catches something that can be addressed - something perhaps that I might not have noticed - I think so! I think the bigger issue is where folks rely to much on automation to intervene. That's where I think you can get into trouble. So, I use my apex as a monitoring and alerting device mostly, and have a plan to address most potential problems as they may occur. That includes having a spare main return pump and a couple of stick heaters on hand.

 

[iDeath]

What version of apex was it? I've spoken with people who do tank maintenance and they seem to indicate that its just a matter of time before the apex craps out.

 

[rkpetersen]

That includes having a spare main return pump and a couple of stick heaters on hand.

And spare circulation pumps. And a spare skimmer pump. And spare tank plumbing parts. Spare cooling fans. Spare cables. And spare Apex components including energy bar, optical sensors, probes, pmup, and now even a controller unit since they became available ala carte a short while ago. With spare parts comes a greater sense of security that you have a decent chance of handling most technical emergencies, even in the middle of the night or over a holiday weekend.

 

[ca1ore]

Yeah, but I think you can 'spare' yourself to death. I just keep on hand spares of things that cannot survive 2-day prime.

 

[User1]

Yeah, but I think you can 'spare' yourself to death. I just keep on hand spares of things that cannot survive 2-day prime.

True. Other ways to skin the cat though (prz don't call PETA no cats have been harmed let alone skinned) and somewhat lower the cost. In my case I've swapped out my skimmer pump and matched it to my return. If something happens to my return I can swap it out with the simmer in less than 5 minutes. Skimmer isn't super critical so can be offline for a couple days while I sort out the issue of my return. I also have a pair of gyre's. I don't need to run both so can take one offline and replace the other. Original skimmer pump wasn't wasted it is now a water change and/or transfer pump.

I think in the end what is important is for each hobbyist to determine what they are comfortable with in regards to backup components or spares and the associated costs.

 

[rkpetersen]

Yeah, but I think you can 'spare' yourself to death. I just keep on hand spares of things that cannot survive 2-day prime.

I see it this way. If it's something that I could see myself at some point really wishing that I had right now, there's no good reason not to get one in advance (price and storage space permitting, obviously.)

It also helps that I'm currently running two identical aquaria, with pretty much identical equipment (in somewhat different configurations.) Spares become even more useful.

 

[Mr. Brooks]

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.

This is false. Apex gear is by no means fool proof.

 

[d2mini]

The truth of the matter is that APEX and GHL are really only hobby grade equipment.

GHL is not just "hobby grade" equipment. It is used in commercial applications, including research facilities.
https://www.aquariumcomputer.com/category/application-examples/

 

[tiggs]

GHL is not just "hobby grade" equipment. It is used in commercial applications, including research facilities.
https://www.aquariumcomputer.com/category/application-examples/

To be fair, Apex and every other big name in the reef world is used in plenty of commercial and research applications as well. That's only because enterprise grade hardware and software made specifically for aquatics doesn't exist. It's not a big enough market for any company to cater to, so they just use the same stuff as us for many things.

When it solely comes down to the quality of hardware components and software, GHL (along with Apex) is absolutely hobby/consumer grade equipment when compared to commercial/enterprise hardware and software components in other industries. I'm actually a big fan of both companies and I'm not knocking them at all, but at the end of the day, a spade is a spade.

 

[d2mini]

To be fair, Apex and every other big name in the reef world is used in plenty of commercial and research applications as well. That's only because enterprise grade hardware and software made specifically for aquatics doesn't exist. It's not a big enough market for any company to cater to, so they just use the same stuff as us for many things.

When it solely comes down to the quality of hardware components and software, GHL (along with Apex) is absolutely hobby/consumer grade equipment when compared to commercial/enterprise hardware and software components in other industries. I'm actually a big fan of both companies and I'm not knocking them at all, but at the end of the day, a spade is a spade.

You might want to ask GHL about those statements.

 

[tiggs]

You might want to ask GHL about those statements.

Every company out there is going to consider their stuff enterprise grade and market it as such in a niche industry like this. The number of commercial/enterprise applications and customers is minute when compared to the number of hobbyists that are potential customers. Also, most people don't have the experience of working with enterprise grade hardware/software in other industries, so they don't have anything to compare.

I could give plenty of examples, especially on the software side of things, that would clearly put them (and every other aquarium controller) in the consumer grade. I'm not trying to dog either company though, so I'll just leave it at that. With that being said, both companies are great and I'm a huge fan of both. Just because something isn't enterprise grade doesn't mean it isn't good for our use.