I’m done hijacking this thread I swear. I started off with the bare minimum like many here and I made it work. But over time I got tired of doing things like adding ro/di by hand to make up for evaporation. So I got an ATO. Awesome, love it. I still have to lug five gallon buckets from the garage to the topoff container, but it’s only once a week. I can live with that. I used to switch off a bunch of power strips to turn off my pumps at feeding time. Now I use a reefkeeper which has a “feed mode”. I used to do water changes on the weekend which I despise. I’m going to be installing an automatic water changer this week to do it every day. Are all of these things necessary? No. But they do make things more convenient. Everything has a learning curve to it though. I’ve had issues with my ato, dosers, calcium reactors, all manner of pumps and loads of other things that were meant to make my life easier until I figured out their quirks. Few things in this hobby are immune to that no matter how high-end accessories may be. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are at least a dozen ecotech/apex/gyre topics based around some quirk in this forum in the last six months alone. I ended up selling a pair of maxspect xf250 gyres because of their quirks and they were NOT cheap, lol. Finally to your question. If you’re running a FOWLR tank, a controller will help by giving your tank an added layer of security, mainly in keeping temperature stable if a heater fails or if the tank gets too hot and you want a fan to turn on. Aside from that, I wouldn’t go crazy and get anything more than a basic controller regardless of brand. I don’t see you needing automated dosing or testing if you’re keeping softies. Water changes will probably give them what they need. If you want remote controllability of pumps and whatnot, the apex is the direction you want to go. Again, everything has its quirks, so don’t expect anything, especially a controller to be plug-and-play. There’s a little setup involved, especially with the more high-end controllers since they can control a lot of different things.
