....It may never happen but what if !!!!!!

[Anthony Mckay]

A thing that I've learned from a disaster or two is if you think it will never happen or its seems the risk is so small you can discount it you just know it will come and bite you right on the butt......HARD.

I'M currently in the middle of a 1000 gallon build and been a tecno head I've been looking at all the controllers on the market and love what they can do the ease at looking at one "dashboard" for all the info. The huge array of adjustable parameters. The way you can connect everything together (some things easier than others and depends if you buy their own brand).

Now after my initial excitement I sat back and thought.....what if !!!!

All my life support is controlled by this one superbly built engineered product it'll be fine......always ???

So after watching some of the great vids from various youtubers and the great advancements in stand alone tech is it better to have everything running on one source or equipment running and set up on the varied individual controllers they come with ????
Nearly every piece of equipment has an app, lights , pumps , wavemakers and now the new kH controllers.
Yes admittedly you'd spend more time setting everything up and monitoring but would that be worth it ?

So I'm after your thoughts, advice, experieces.

If you're super controller goes down you've lost everything at once and we all know a reef tank can go south very quickly !!!!!

On the other hand it would be rare (but as we've said never say never) for two different controllers on different equipment to fail at the same time.

Am I been too cautious or producing a lot of what drops out of the back of a male cow.

Really would like peoples feedback.
Thanks
Anthony

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

Sometimes simplicity is the best. I've always felt that some reefers rely too heavily on gadgets and gizmos to take care of their tank for them. Redundant systems such as two heaters both controlled by temperature dependent controllers that simply turn the electricity off if the tank water gets too hot make sense to me, but having a single controller manage all of the systems on your tank feels a bit risky to me.

On the other hand, I feel much better about aquarium monitors. These tools give information and control back to the hobbyist but still save time. Since they don't control things like dosers, heaters, chillers, etc., I feel like they are much less of a risk since if they fail the only thing that is affected is the information feed. If a controller fails and doesn't shut off a doser, there goes your entire tank. I'm not saying it happens often, but it can still happen so it's definitely something to consider and ask yourself if you're willing to take that gamble.

I don't think you're being too cautious, better to think about this stuff now before you invest time, money, and a whole lot of effort into it.

 

[MaddyP]

This is an interesting topic, I believe there was another thread discussing this in the past.

My thoughts are every piece of equipment has a chance of failure. If each piece of equipment is relying on its own control, each item has its own failure chance. If you mathematically include all these chances of failure you'll see the more equipment you include increases the percentage chance of something failing. However, if you now have a monitoring system that also has failsafes in the case something fails, you have a reduced chance of failure on those pieces of equipment.

Overall, my perpesctive is a control/monitoring system with redundancies in place has a much lower chance of failure than without a control/monitoring system.

 

[Anthony Mckay]

What monitor rather than controller do people use and recommend ?
Thanks

 

[MaddyP]

What monitor rather than controller do people use and recommend ?
Thanks

For me, the only trustworthy systems are Apex and GHL. Both offer control and monitoring. You can use either or both.

 

[DLHDesign]

Controllers can't - likely won't ever - fully take the place of being involved in your tank; that's not really their purpose. The goal of a controller (in my opinion) is to make some of the tasks involved in reef keeping more convenient and timely. You might test your key params twice a day, but what happens when your heater goes out in the middle of the day? A controller could tell you about that happening (with an email and/or a text, for example) in near-real time.

If [your] super controller goes down you've lost everything at once and we all know a reef tank can go south very quickly !!!!!

One of the nice things about the Apex is that it is connected to the Internet. This is a critical component of the controller because it means you will get alerts even should the Apex unit totally loose power. You can also set up alarms on each power outlet (with the new one, at least) so that you can get alerted if anything looks out-of-sorts - for example; heater should be on, but no amps are being drawn. So while you do run the risk of a single point of failure, it's not a very high risk comparatively, IMO.

Note that it's also possible to have an "emergency backup" monitoring set up. In my tank, for example, I have the Apex unit doing the heavy lifting, but I also keep a SenEye in the tank (which I also use for PAR and ammonia measurements). Should the Apex report a failure, I can cross-check the key stuff against the data from the SenEye to gauge how serious the problem(s) may be. At the same time, I don't feel the SenEye was a waste of an investment; in part because of the PAR/ammonia measurements, but also because I have often moved the SenEye into my QT tanks to monitor things there.