Apex controller

[daplatapus]

Ok guys, I need some help please. I tried reading on line and the manual, but some of this stuff is greek to me and I'm having a hard time making heads or tails of it. I thought I'd ask here first seeing how I know a few of ya


I've finally got my used Apex up and running. Right now I've got my temp sensor, pH and pH2 sensor connected. I'm not exactly sure what the pH2/orp one is doing right now, but it seams to be working. I've got a ethernet line hardwired to my network at home and can see everything on my Mac.

My EB8 only has one dosing pump plugged into it and thus my question. The pump I have is dosing Vodka via a 1.1ml/min doser. I have until now been dosing 2X a day. Once usually around 8 am and again somewhere between 6-8 pm. I hooked the doser up in my office and ran it for a week just using water in 2 containers and I think I have the actual timing down. I'm at 3.3 ml every 12 hours in my dosing schedule so I use this as my program:

Fallback OFF
OSC 480:00/003:00/237:00 Then ON
If FeedA 000 Then OFF


Here's my question. I've noticed in other peoples programs, they have a fail safe in there, but so far none of them make sense and I didn't want to add a line I didn't fully understand. Should I be adding anything or should I be running this pump differently altogether? If I need to add a failsafe, how do I do it?
Thanks in advance!

[Aquattro]

I don't run a dosing pump, but pretty sure you don't need to include the FEED function

[daplatapus]

Lol, ya, it auto input it in there so I just left it

[kacairns]

The FEED function could have place there depending if you're dosing into your sump instead of main tank. If pumps are off during FEED cycle you'd be dumping your full amount of stuff into your sump that depending on the length of the FEED cycle might not be a good idea. With that said, you'd also end up missing a dosing if the FEED cycle was going when doser was supposed to be.

Fail safes only work if you have some way to monitor what you're doing. For example when people dose Co2, the pH is affected by it, so people monitor the pH to see what the Co2 is doing, if pH levels go below where they want, the dosing of Co2 can be disabled at that time, and alert sent out.

For vodka dosing since I just googled what it does quickly, The Apex doesn't have a probe that would be able to monitor anything the vodka would change so you wouldn't be able to put in a fail safe as you wouldn't be able to tell if anything is wrong due to the vodka dosing. The only thing you could setup as a fail safe is that if other things are going wrong in the tank stop the dosing, but honestly stopping the dosing based on other things going wrong, could be a recipe for disaster as it could just compound the problem

[daplatapus]

One of the fail safe's I thought I saw, predetermined when a socket could be available. So say I wanted to start dosing at 8 am for 3 min. I could lock out the socket from doing anything if it wasn't, say 7:59 - 8:05. If that first condition was met (the clock read anywhere from 7:59 to 8:05), then it could move onto the actual program. If something went wrong with the program, the worst case scenario is I'd dose for 6 min (7:59-805 when that first condition shut the socket down) instead of an hour or more or, eek until the bottle was empty - thus killing the tank.
Maybe what I was looking at was overly complicated or I totally didn't understand it, lol.

[kacairns]

Not sure as to why you would need a Time statement to limit the time it could be run, as your OSC statement is just a much more advanced version of TIME.

Starting at Midnight SET OFF for 480 minutes, The turn on for 3 minutes, then back off 237 minutes REPEAT... So it repeats waiting for 480 minutes in off, then turns on for 3 minutes then OFF again for 237 minutes and Resets the OSC command at Midnight to run the pattern again.

Even with that said off the top of my head I don't think you could have the redundancy that you are talking about using both the TIME and the OSC function together, but I could be completely wrong about that! =)