I never said he didn't own a HW, nor did I claim that his coral losses did not mean anything, in fact to the contrary I commended his concern for his animals.
What I tried to say is that 2/3 of the time the "Apex fault" is on the side of the programmer, and most of the other 1/3 of failures can be prevented with failsafes (heater failure, primary return failure, EB8 failure, etc). I am an engineer as well and I believe that we make a profession out of trying to beat Murphy's Law. I am shocked that so many of your Neptune subsystems have failed. If that is the case, for someone with your education, a raspberry pi based controller may be the best solution. Then if anything goes belly up, you have free reign to troubleshoot yourself. An apex is for folks who either cannot build their own controller but want one, or those who, for the money, don't want to spend the time to do so (thats me).
Not to belittle the OPs situation, I do certainly feel for him and I sincerely hope that they get to the bottom of his issue and that his system can recover. I am just saying that a properly programmed Apex has saved far more systems than it has failed. Aquarium controllers have revolutionized reef tank stability, and continue to improve yearly. So in summary, to call the most successful system on the market "junk" simply is not responsible in my opinion.
