Are you serious?!?
 

I'm on a flight out of town tomorrow at 6pm and today my Apex Controller decides to die. As in poof, just stops working.

WTF? Why me?

Now I have to train the house sitter how to dose, check the temp, etc.

Why didn't this happen 2 weeks ago?

You're kidding! When did you get the controller? Should that be under warranty? Did you have a power failure?

Oh man does that ever suck!

That's called Murphey's law at its best!

The same reason why it is always your favorite coral that will RTN or melt...why can't it be those ugly polyps in the corner?

that sucks!!
at this point doesnt karma bring in a heavy storm with possible power outages just to make sure you worry for the entire trip?? lol

kidding, hope you get it figured!!

This is why I spend a solid 5 minutes in reef meditation daily staring at my valonia and aiptasia repeating the following to myself:

"you are my favorites... you are my favorites... you are my favorites..."

So far nada :cry:

I think I should copy you to do like that from now on with red and blue mushrooms.

I'm trying to re-flash the firmware. We'll see if I have any luck. Otherwise I'll have to switch over to the old coralife timer light bar :(

We should never trust glorified $900 timers.
.

My glorified timer let me check my tank all week from Costa Rica. My $15 Rona timer never did that! :biggrin:

It could be worse... At least you have time to train someone to look after it. It could have happened tomarrow at 6:01 PM :wink:

Firmware flash worked, then 10 minutes later it crapped out again.

Base unit must be fried. Stupid electronics. I guess they don't build them for Apollo missions.

I'll have to call up Neptune when I get back and do the debugging thing. Doubt this will be fixed by xmas.

:(

uh oh...sorry to hear man. Is this a common problem with the Apex systems? Im looking into either the Apex or the RK

Based off my reading in the Neptune forum on RC, no, this isn't common. I've been running mine now for a while, no issues at all. However, like all things in this hobby (or any other hobby), there are always units that fail for some reason. Support from Neptune is great, so should a problem be encountered, it's generally corrected promptly. Of course if you're leaving town the next day, you're still kinda screwed....

awesome great to hear as I really want the Apex over the RK

How much are you "controlling" with your APEX?

Any visible sign of problems (unit got wet, dropped etc)?

Were there any warning signs before it "Poofed"?

If you don't get it resolved you might want to look into a more robust controller ie GHL ProfiLux.

Were you using this controller during all your new MH bulb issue's in your other thread? Could the constant tripping have affected it? Or the overloading/whatever the hell was going on?
http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/sho...threadid=80919

I would imagine all those ups n downs would be hard on the internals of the controller.

Based on what? IMO the Apex is every bit as "robust" as the Profilux at a lot less money.
Support is awesome, Kurt gets right back to you, lots of documentation and very few issues reported on RC. Mine's been rock solid every day I've used it. Easy to setup and easy to use, very useful access over my phone.

Precisely the reason/s we chose the Apex.

Based on First Hand Experience? Yes indeed! I've been there done that! Don't take it personally against you or anyone else.

I've owned several "controllers" and for my needs, for my reliability requirements etc the ProfiLux is second to none. Of course many people will disagree but most of them haven't owned the ProfiLux so it comes back to the "this cost more... yadda yadda uadda" debate which is pointless. Of course if you look at the "meat and taters" of comparable units and compare you'll see that ProfiLux only appears to be costly if you don't dig any deeper than that. C'est la vie!

If your APEX works flawlessly for you then that's really all that matters in the end. I merely offered a suggestion to someone who is having extreme APEX problems from someone who has been there and found that the ProfiLux is a much better fit.

If this ruffled some feathers I apologize as that was not the intention nor to start the "My controller is bigger than your controller debate".

Allen

I'm not trying to come off as elitist here but I'm light-years beyond your gadgetry!

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...yyr2c5ayGaHkVE

I got me one of them too!! :)

Any updates on this issue?

Hopefully you got it resolved before you left for your trip.

WHAT THE DUECE IS THAT??

Well if you can believe it, the un-trusty old Coralife dual timer has now failed on my housesitter. It won't come on at the scheduled time reliably. I guess those cheap mechanical timers wear out. That was my second Coralife timer. Same thing happened to the first one.

So she's down to manually turning the halides on and off for their 8 hours each day.

But other than that everything is happy.

I don't think the earlier tripping issue is related because I think I stabilized it a few days prior by removing the bulbs and swapping them around and ensuring they were seated 100% correctly. There was no corresponding power outage for when the Apex died. It just randomly crashed.

Any electrical device should be able to be turned off and on at least once or twice per day. And the base controller is a separate module, so it doesn't take a hit when the EB8 goes on and off. Yes it does get a small amount of power from it via the Aquabus, but it's probably only 5 or 12 volts. I may even try getting a dedicated power supply for the base module.

It's the controller that comes with an aqualogic chiller..

My Controller is me.:smile:

I must say though, other than this experience, the Apex has been solid and I love it.