Neptune Aquatics

GHL SUCKS. BECAREFUL

Turkeysammich

Turkeysammich

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Hey Guys.
I have a story to share. About a month ago 2 of my Ghl lights started acting up and basically went out. Don’t know why. They are about 4-6 years old. I posted this and srt4eric really helped me out. He let me borrow 2 radion gen4. I’ve meet him a few times and we are cool. But dang talk about coming thru. And ways. This morning I hear a bang. I go into the fish room and the whole room is filled with smoke. There was zero warning. Light wasn’t acting strange days prior. The ballast blew up. I even had a huge heat sink under it for years so it wouldn’t get so hot. I use to have all GHL equipment and over the years I’ve slowly gotten rid of it because they suck. Btw. No alarm from my apex.
 

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Yeah. I’m super lucky. You know if it was some cheap equipment I would be like ok. I skimped. But nope this is high end stuff. In all these years I’ve never had anything explode like that. Go out yeah but not to this extreme. Lucky I was home.
 
I'm confused, you said a month ago the light was acting up, but then say the light wasn't acting strange days prior? So it was acting strange a month prior just not before the kaboom?

I mean not to try to sound like a GHL fanboy (I'm not) but 4-6 years for a driver doesn't sound horrible, the electronics in it WILL fail and if you ran it 10 hours a day for 6 years you may be pushing the realistic limits of how long the components are rated for (which you probably don't know which ones as they love to encase the shit in a thermal epoxy so shit can't be reversed engineered... or fixed). In fact that's where most lights in general fail whether it's aquarium or the screw in bulbs in your ceiling, the drivers die well before the LEDs crap out.

That said, if the driver is the only thing that died count yourself lucky, all you need to do is figure the output specs of the driver (should be written on it) and you can replace it with either cheap stuff (~$40) or more expensive stuff (~$120), 24V LED drivers that output 200+W are not uncommon at all.
 
I can see being upset by this, I would be too. The description of events isn’t leaving me really understanding what happened before and what happened today, other than it looks like one of the transformers failed/blew. The title of the thread seems unwarrantedly harsh towards GHL to me. Excelsys is the maker of the transformer/LED driver that failed. I’m not particularly defending GHL, I actually don’t have any experience with their products. But having a stock transformer (sourced but not made by GHL) fail after several years doesn’t seem so damning for their entire company to me. Sounds like there’s other history with them that is contributing to you being upset at GHL.

Regarding an alert from your Apex- you have to set that up. It’s called ”power usage alarms” and definitely worth doing. I’m glad you caught it right away.
 
I have 3 Ghl lights. 2 was acting up a month ago. And Eric is helping me out. I had 1 more over my dt. That was fine. Sorry I should have explained it better.
Yeah I’m just very upset with all their stuff. I e spent over 5k on Ghl stuff thinking it was the best. Every product has been a let down to say the least.
 
Yeah exploding electronics is scary... but the unfortunate thing is some electronics components do explode if damaged whether it's an electrolytic capacitor or the battery that is inside a phone that you probably keep in your pocket next to your sensitive "stuff" :)

GHL stuff is expensive, it's the "German engineering superiority" type of expensive though, it's really not that much better than other stuff, and the sucky thing is that most all brand name LEDs are all flipping expensive whether it's GHL, Ecotech or Kessil, and I'm sure they all use what the other guy charges as a metric to what they can get away with charging. There's really not many options between those manufacturers and the scary rebranded Chinese junk you see on Amazon, I remember every time I would see a new light from a different manufacturer advertised I'd get excited then see the pricing and they all are in that $800-900 per fixture range.
 
phc567 said:
Don’t get me wrong. Going out is one thing. And I’m cool with it breaking. But it exploded. That I’m not cool with.
Click to expand...
Yea I agreed, exploded totally suck.
@JVU
Can you please provide the code for “power usage alarms”. I would love to set that up on my apex, does it work on classic? TIA
 
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It requires using the EB832 power supply since the monitoring hardware is built in to them, and as far as I know does not work with Apex Classic.

If you have a system that supports it, there is a Task Wizard with the same name in Apex Fusion that makes it easy to set up. Basically you set high and low thresholds for expected amps or watts that a device should draw when turned on. If it is above (failed with a short or excessive power draw) or below (failed off) it alarms. You can get false alarms if you set the thresholds poorly or if the device has it’s own controller that can turn it on/off when the Apex switch is still on.
 
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