Ecotech Versa pump stopping at midnight?

[beatle]

I just got my bank of versa pumps online a couple days ago. I am currently using two of them for an automatic water change. They do their thing all day, and then at midnight the drain pump stops dosing. This has happened three nights in a row. If I pause and restart it or if I manually hit the button on the pump's slot in the bank, the pump starts working again and will catch up to the amount pumped by the new saltwater pump. I used the water change template for each, and the schedule is set for 24 hours automatically by the template. Anyone have an idea what's happening here?

 

[jsker]

#reefsquad

not knowing, it seems that there may be something in the settings that have not been updated at the pump. Have you tried changing the settings for that pump? May change the setting and then change the setting back to were the setting is now?

 

[Sean Clark]

Some of the templates are buggy for some reason.

Go into the settings and under the dosing schedule check to see that the mode is set to smart.

You could also just enter your rate and switch the mode to continuous with a max daily of none and it will just run 24/7 at the rate you choose.

 

[beatle]

Yes, I've gone through and changed from smart to continuous and back. I notice that that the amount dosed does not save until I set it multiple times, same with the volume of my saltwater reservoir. Not particularly encouraging since this could have caused a flood had I not checked it the next day.

 

[beatle]

Yesterday I paused the pumps while I refilled and mixed a new batch of saltwater. I paused both of the pumps and did a lot of random configurations on them before eventually setting them back to their original configuration. This morning it seems that both are working in tandem with no stops. I wish I could say what I did in case someone else finds this post (or if it happens to me again).

 

[beatle]

Well so much for that. I woke up this morning and neither pump was working. I guess that's better than only one working, but still, this is very frustrating.

 

[Sean Clark]

Maybe try setting them up without using the templates and see what happens.

 

[beatle]

I've been in contact with support (slow going) who told me to reset all of them and try again. If you have the base station, note that you need to use the priming button for each pump to reset each one. The reset procedure requires pressing the button quickly three times, and on the third press to hold for 10 seconds until one of the pump's lights starts to flash red. Let go and in 10-15 seconds the pump should be reset to factory settings. I found this is useful if the pump does not want to connect to the app.

It was an incredible hassle to create a new tank and add the devices since I could only add three of them. One of them failed to connect. I then noticed that one was stuck to my old tank. It was challenging to delete the old tank. I still don't know how I was able to delete it. It is some kind of bizarre long press and swipe motion to get a red X to appear on the right. I have never seen an interface like this.

Anyway, after I deleted the old tank I could then add the fourth pump to my "new" tank. However, when setting up the pumps I noticed that it did not allow for user templates to be used. I could create one but I could not assign one to a pump. I used the water change template for two of them, recalibrated them, then activated them. I woke up this morning and they are both still working so that's a good sign. I will probably shut them off when I leave town this weekend, just in case.

Overall, this is easily the worst app I've used with terrible documentation. I'd say even LOOP is better (and I had my teething moments with that too). Most of the EcoTech documentation seems to be out of date (2+ year old videos with a completely different interface) or nonexistent (just a quickstart guide that shows you how to plug it in). This is my first EcoTech product and I really expected more given how popular they are.

 

[beatle]

Stopped again this morning. Will see what support says.

 

[beatle]

Still nothing from support. I gave them the serials so they can look at things. This morning I found my new saltwater pump was still working but the drain pump was not.

 

[beatle]

Before I left for the weekend, support recommended I change the schedule to run from midnight to 11:45pm. I made that change on Sunday evening (set custom schedule) and saw that the pumps have continued to run through the night, so this workaround seems to have done the job. I was told that an upcoming app update should address this to work properly with the original template, but until then, I would recommend this workaround for anyone using a 24 hour schedule.

 

[Sean Clark]

Mobius is a joke. It is sad that they use coustomers as Bata testers for their buggy software.

 

[beatle]

I mentioned earlier that I expected more. That's still the case. At least there was a workaround for this problem.

Here's a somewhat related service note. When I came home on Sunday I went to make the change to my pumps' schedules, but Mobius kept complaining that I had a wireless connectivity problem (this was not the case - my wifi and internet connection was fine). In reality I believe the Mobius service was experiencing an outage. Since the pumps themselves do not have wifi capability, you connect to them via bluetooth. No real problem with that, but since you are forced to connect to Mobius cloud servers before accessing your pumps, it means that you get all the downsides of a cloud managed service (internet outage or cloud service provider outage impeding your ability to do anything) without most of the benefits (make schedule changes remotely, start/stop equipment remotely, view status remotely, etc.) Further, since a connection to the Mobius service is apparently required to make any changes to the product, I sure hope it stays on indefinitely and does not switch to a "subscription" model the way a lot of cloud services are structured. <tinfoil hat off>

During the support session, EcoTech was able to see the status of my pumps via my phone relaying their status to their servers. This is better than nothing, but it really is kind of a hack for something so simple. If this were a brand new service or product I could cut them more of a break on some of these teething issues, but the pumps came out over 2 1/2 years ago!