melev

Last weekend, I attended San Diego's Comic Con (Thursday to Sunday). I had a great time, and during my time away, a friend watched the reef to make sure all was well. There was a power outage on Friday night, and the Apex notified me via text and email, but never informed me if power was restored. I didn't really feel comfortable contacting my friend at 2 a.m. his time, so I wrote him the next morning to let him know and have him give me an update. He stopped by and reported all was fine. Whew.

In the meantime, I'm updating the Apex controller's code to give me a Power Returned message as well, for peace of mind. In the process of doing this, I noticed a couple of dumb mistakes. The Apex is wired to a energy bar (the EB-8 that many plugs fit into), and then I have a typical 12v power supply plugged into a UPS to give it juice to send me those notifications even when the house loses power. The Apex is hardwired to the router, and the router has its own UPS as well. Well, apparently when the power was out for 13 hours a few weeks ago, the UPS got flipped off to quit chirping at me, and was off ever since. Fixed.

The other mistake was a bigger no-no. The frag tank has lots of pretty pieces in it, but the feed line that brings in new water from the sump's filtration was closed, probably for my entire trip. Not sure how or when that happened, but a few corals took a hit. The Vortech was providing flow all that time, but there was no temperature control nor was alkalinity & calcium supplemented. The valve is now open, and hopefully those struggling corals can begin to heal.

Dumb mistakes. Ugh! Here are a few pictures from my vacation; I have plenty to edit and upload later.