My thoughts on the Coral Vue Hydros:
So, husband bought one for me during the black friday sale as an early xmas gift.
It arrived today, so I went ahead and set it up. It probably took me 2 hours total for doing very small things, but I had to move around a bunch plugs yada yada.
First impressions were awesome! Great packaging, speedy delivery. Everything arrived in one piece, no missing pieces. Excellent!
Closer look? Oof.
I definitely wasn't expecting GHL level quality but I was kind of annoyed by CV's lack of quality control on the visual aspect of the controller. I was always under the impression that the controller had the labels of the ports under the plastic cover, but that wasn't the case. Which in and of itself is not a big deal. HOWEVER, the design of the Hydros was clearly intended with the port label piece sitting in a specific recessed/grooved area. My controller's label piece was clearly drunk, not sitting correctly or cut correctly or something.
Edge of port label sitting above recessed area.
The only corner where label piece is seated correctly
Gap between cardpaper label & grooved area.
Top left corner was the worst with the label sitting above and past the cutout area. It really annoyed me that the cardstock/board label piece was off center because THERE IS NO WAY FOR ME TO FIX THIS due to the punch outs for the port connections. (CV also saw this complaint posted on my IG but did not comment or suggest any solution to this even if it is cosmetic).
To add to this annoyance, one of the screws on my slim temp probe at the port connection part was partially unscrewed, and I tightened it with an eyeglass screwdriver.
Despite those annoyances, the rest of my setup process was fairly smooth. The controller & probes were very easy to set up, calibrating the pH port was very easy. It came with a pH 7 & 10 calibration fluid, no 4 but apparently CV recommends that you calibrate with all 3.
The longest part was pairing the powerstrip to the app. I learned the powerstrip does not do well with mesh networks. In my Eero, I had to temporarily disable 5GHz and only enable 2.4GHz so that the powerstrip would actually connected. I had power cycled the powerstrip by the 6th time before I finally found a resource online stating this fact.
Afterwards, I set up my devices without any issues.
The app was also very straight forward. It was the first result when searching "hydros" in the Apple app store. Account creation was also very easy. It provides the information from your Hydros controller in a very clean manner. The only thing I didn't like was having to select the input device I'm connecting and which port I'm connecting it too. I feel like that just adds additional room for error, and the device should be able to auto detect which port is connected. Maybe CV will add that in the future.
I plan to add my skimmer & carbon reactor to this powerstrip as well so that I can easily automate all pumps off for maintenance going forward!
Sometime this next weekend, I plan to sit down and do some major cable management. I can't think weekend because semester final deadlines.
Overall, 7/10 on the Hydros. I think most people should be able to set it up without difficulty. Troubleshooting is easy. Needs to improve on QC.
