We will name this post... the fun continues!
So as some of you might already know, we went away for 5 weeks. Thankfully I have met such awesome reefers that I now consider good mates through this forum and MASOV. One who was kind enough to visit my house twice a week and look after the tank while I was away. This made our holiday that much more enjoyable and relaxing. You know who you are
First 4 weeks went smoothly, tank was doing well few minor adjustments to the calcium reactor for increase uptake and we were good to go. Or were we?
Then came Friday the 13th.. now I'm not a believer in bad luck but it sure as hell seemed that way. My Neptune Apex controller decided to freeze and call it quits after 2 years in service. For those who have an apex I want to share exactly what happened so that if it happens to you, you can react a lot faster than I did.
Here's what happened:
Friday 13th - I get a heartbeat notification from Neptune Fusion, which is a cloud based software. This basically told me that the apex was not connected to the cloud (internet) based server. It's happened before and usually means our internet is down or there's a disconnect somewhere between the router and the apex. I didn't think much of it, checked the camera in the fish room and saw what seemed like everything was running and the screen on the apex was still showing the parameters (or so I thought).
Saturday - Still no connection. So I asked the house sitter to check on the controller. From what she can see the tank is still running and the controller screen is lit up and showing the parameters. I thought we'd try and reset the controller to see if it connects again but the controller touch pad is unresponsive/frozen. We tried to hard reset it a few times but it was stuck in loop trying to connect to the other modules. We also tried to re-flash the firmware but again no luck. I had to call for back-up. Thankfully the return pump, DT lights and Gyre were still running.
Sunday - Back-up arrives. Spent 2 hours on the phone trying to guide my neighbour how to re-wire the heaters, ato, awc, vortechs and the list goes on...
In summary, when the controller failed everything went back to 'fallback mode'. So for example the return pump was set to 'Fallback On'. It stayed on. The heaters were set to 'Fallback Off' for obvious reasons. They went off.
This is what was still working (basically anything that the controller should never switch off unless I tell it too):
- Return
- Frag tank pump
- Tank lights
- Calcium reactor re circulation and feed pumps
This is what wasn't working:
- Ecotech vortechs (controlled by the apex WXM)
- Ecotech Radion (controlled by the apex WXM)
- Skimmer
- Heaters
- Cooling Fans
- ATO
- AWC
- Calcium reactor solenoid for CO2
- Automatic feeder
- Neck cleaner
- Sump light
So what did I learn. Well firstly, if it's going to be installed in my fish room it's going to break down at some point.
Secondly, when you set up a controller, plan that one day it will fail and set out the correct measures to ensure the tank survives. Here's what I'm considering to change:
- Somehow set up the heaters to work even without the apex running. Maybe set the internal thermostats higher and fallback 'on'? Or it's been suggested to run an STC-1000 in series with a lower threshold for temperature?
- Set up access to my home network from my phone so that I don't need to depend on the could access (fusion) and I can check if the apex is still actually working
- Reduce 'depending' on the apex to run certain equipment
That's all I can think of... any more suggestions?
I should add, no fish or coral were harmed this Friday the 13th. Thankfully.
I'm in Mickleham.
