Vortech Failure

[DiverDude]

Originally Posted by globaldesigns

You need to try them Mark... I do love mine overall and even though they are expensive, they are worth the money. The settings on the Vortechs do more than any wavebox can do. Sorry, but a wavebox just doesn't compare in my opinion, in areas of creating undertows, exporting of nutrients and elimination of dead spots.

Edit: also in regards to service, I can say they are great, quite comparable to Hydor.

No argument on the product's functionality, just it's reliability. These pumps are meant to replace multiple smaller pumps which, when they work, is great. However when they fail, they represent a single point of failure that means NO FLOW until it's fixed. For those of us who upgrade from other powerheads that we KEPT, we can hobble along. For those who either jumped right into one of these or sold their old powerheads......well....that can be a real problem.

These products are priced at a real premium and as such should represent premium value -which, for a mission-critical component, means RELIABILITY.

I'd be curious to see some hard numbers on how many of these have been sold and how many have had issues. From my perspective, there's an unusually high number of problems but for all I know, the problems represent 1% of all the units in the field -a pretty respectable number from a manufacturing point of view. Now we're never going to see those numbers so we only have perceptions to go on.

As someome starting to plan for a larger tank in the future and who was planning on putting an MP40 in it, I have to tell you, I'm pretty nervous about spending $500 on a pump and have it fail 1 month after the warranty is over. I'm pretty handy and have a full shop so changing the bearings doesn't scare me but the point is that for $500, I shouldn't HAVE to.