Neptune Aquatics

Neptune

The apex classic that's running my frag tank lights has done it twice today.

But it's 10 years old and has a history of doing that... Hence why it only runs lights.
 
Part of why I ditched mine years ago. Being able to control the lights/check ph on my phone didn’t outweigh the trustworthiness of a Ranco. Not to mention the $$$.
 
iCon said:
Part of why I ditched mine years ago. Being able to control the lights/check ph on my phone didn’t outweigh the trustworthiness of a Ranco. Not to mention the $$$.
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Spot on. Its un popular openion but Neptune have done a bad job the way they ate serving their customers.
I started doing the same thing 2 years ago. Now apex is more of temp control and on off switch for couple of things.
Most of my vital equipments are controlled by their native app.

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Ha. Mine just did this about an hour ago.

Just the eb8 randomly shut off for a second and then back on. Scared the hell outta me.


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My Apex Lite did that. It turned out to be a something going bad on the EB8. It would cycle on and off randomly.

Neptune support wasn’t helpful, suggesting it was the head unit and offering a replacement for a lot of $$$. The director of sales reached back out last year when I gave a negative survey response and escalated my issue and issued a return label to diagnose. Still charged for the repair, but less than buying a new EB8.
 
I treat mine like a piece of non-reef safe electronic equipment, and that has done well for me. The times I've treated them like something designed to be around salt mist, and the people I know that do that, have had issues. I know one guy who kills the head units so often that he now owns two, so that he has a spare when sending the other in for repair. That said, if you saw the high temp high humidity area he keeps it you would be only half surprised. Not saying these things are MIL-spec robust because they aren't, but mine have been good so far with specific exceptions.

Those specific exceptions are wireless connection (actually, lots of aquarium electronics seem to be an issue with that point), and an occasional wired reconnection issue on my classic Apex when the power blinks. Oddly I never have a wired reconnection issue on an unplug>plug back in type power loss. Interestingly one of my DC return pumps has issues with the same events that confuse the Apex. The unit keeps working and doing all of its I/O functions correctly, it just doesn't connect online.

The only time I see this as an issue is if I remotely turn a dosing pump to manual on, then have the connection go down before I shut it off. I do have a pH cutoff, but I wonder if there is a way with something like the When command to protect for this? My solution is to never request a manual-on of a dosing pump outlet remotely.
 
Additional thoughts: My new (a few months) Apex does have wireless connection issues (had one for a few minutes tonight), but that may be something at this end, and that goes back to my belief about wiring them in. I will say their warranty support is good IF you are in warranty AND can locate your original receipt (photograph those and e-mail them to yourself). Miss either of those two things I agree that it leaves a lot to be desired. I'd be a lot happier if they had at least a product registration system so you didn't have to keep the receipt pictures.
 
jccaclimber said:
Additional thoughts: My new (a few months) Apex does have wireless connection issues (had one for a few minutes tonight), but that may be something at this end, and that goes back to my belief about wiring them in. I will say their warranty support is good IF you are in warranty AND can locate your original receipt (photograph those and e-mail them to yourself). Miss either of those two things I agree that it leaves a lot to be desired. I'd be a lot happier if they had at least a product registration system so you didn't have to keep the receipt pictures.
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That's why I always keep the box for expensive stuff and the receipt inside.

The email idea is good though.
 
Coincidental timing maybe but although generally my Apex 2016 works solidly (except for my salinity probe which is crap and one of the DDR sensors that flips on/off randomly), yesterday and today it has lost connection to my WiFi (other devices are connected fine).

I tried rebooting the WiFi and the Apex and so far didn’t reconnect. Everything is still working fine I just can’t connect to it. Haven’t had time to mess with it further since I’ve been working this weekend. Annoying though that I have to spend hours debugging a product before I can intelligently ask the company for assistance.
 
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Didn’t use their customer support much, but when my Apex died, I recall them charging me a reasonable amount to fix it. The most helpful person I encountered wasn’t even a Neptune employee, but an old timer on RC. Don’t recall his handle, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was still helping people with their fancy controllers :)
 
There was an issue with one of the APEX Fusion servers Sunday evening. Our IT/engineering staff were automatically alerted of this, and the issue was resolved shortly thereafter. Your Apex probably restarted itself in an attempt to re-establish communications with APEX Fusion during the brief period APEX Fusion was partially offline. If you are still experiencing any issues, please let us know by creating a Support ticket.

https://www.neptunesystems.com/support/contact-support/
 
I rebooted my Apex (again) with the inset reset button and this time it connected. Not sure why this time was successful but it’s back up again.
 
jonmos75 said:
There was an issue with one of the APEX Fusion servers Sunday evening. Our IT/engineering staff were automatically alerted of this, and the issue was resolved shortly thereafter. Your Apex probably restarted itself in an attempt to re-establish communications with APEX Fusion during the brief period APEX Fusion was partially offline.
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So a server went down and some % of the apex units around the world repeatedly reset power to all their connected devices? Is there a way to configure an apex so it functions reliably and can be managed locally if there’s a problem with the fusion servers?
 
jonmos75 said:
Your Apex probably restarted itself in an attempt to re-establish communications with APEX Fusion during the brief period APEX Fusion was partially offline.
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Out of curiosity what is the cloud based need of the Apex? Is it just the portal to program and save data?

That said is there a way to disable the "restart on phone home" failure? Seems like a fairly annoying, possibly tank damaging response. Automation is great, but there has to be a point where you go "yanno what let me do all the resetting". Especially if you don't have internet that goes down periodically, even if it's something as simple as wifi going down, TimeToWaitOnCallHome=Never type command?
 
Seems like something that should require a confirmation before attempting. I can't imagine the outrage if a game console or pc reset itself to re establish cloud services....
 
Bruce Spiegelman said:
I assume if you do all your programming via the head unit and don't have it hooked up wirelessly this issue would never occur.
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Is that something you can do though? I thought the purpose of of the latest Apex was to shift the need for hardware in the box that runs an OS and stores lots of data points to a cloud based system where they can keep that hardware remote.

But if there is in fact a way to turn off phone home troubleshooting by the unit, that would be a good thing.
 
I’m still dumbfounded that this could possibly happen. Mine reset multiple times. I’m just glad I have all dc pumps with a soft start. That could have ended badly.

Or worse yet, it shuts down and doesn’t heat my tank. Yikes.

I have the apex classic


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