The Apex completely changed reef keeping for me. It didn't happen all at once, when I first got it I used it for monitoring and maybe turning my lights on and off. Now it runs everything; this is not a complete list but some things I have it do are, complex pump wave and light patterns, automatic continuous water changes and top off, dosing, logging measurements and analysis and the list goes on and on. But the most important thing by far is that it allowed me to build double redundancy into critical systems, so stupid things like heater malfunctions or a broken return pump don't wipe out my tank. I'm a huge fan.