sorry to hear and agree with twin 400wt . I prefer titanium units with built in thermostats
HELLLLLLP!! Woke up to crashed tank - 99 degrees!!
- Thread starter alabella1
- Start date
Morning everyone. Thanks to all of you for helping me through this nightmare of a day. The dead have all been recovered and given proper burials. Tank cleaned, water changed, Coral all pulled out into a rubbermaid for assessment. Replacement Apex arrived and configured. Found which of the Ranco controllers failed and pulled it from the setup.
Somehow 2 fish survived! Gold stripe Maroon Clownfish and the OG Pajama Cardinal who is, was and likely will continue to be my oldest/hardiest fish. This guy has survived velvet, ich, being boiled, he is the Duke of the tank. Other survivors include a handful of snails and hermits and 2x sea cucumbers.
$1500 worth of fish are gone. The good news is I have 8 fish in observation from Dr. Reef. They are all doing well and I thank God that I hadn't moved them to the DT yet so they were spared.
This week I begin the rebuild with them, a $250 gc to my LFS from xmas and will be working on putting more redundancy in place to avoid this in the future.
Somehow 2 fish survived! Gold stripe Maroon Clownfish and the OG Pajama Cardinal who is, was and likely will continue to be my oldest/hardiest fish. This guy has survived velvet, ich, being boiled, he is the Duke of the tank. Other survivors include a handful of snails and hermits and 2x sea cucumbers.
$1500 worth of fish are gone. The good news is I have 8 fish in observation from Dr. Reef. They are all doing well and I thank God that I hadn't moved them to the DT yet so they were spared.
This week I begin the rebuild with them, a $250 gc to my LFS from xmas and will be working on putting more redundancy in place to avoid this in the future.
Sounds like a good plan, and way to work through it, that's all you can do, unfortunately all learning experiences are different but im sure you will come out of this with personal growth! Good luck with the path ahead, looking forward to seeing the new reef one day!
Same, I'd assume it has to be a combination failure of the controller and the ranco simultaneously with a non thermostatheating element.
The ranco would fail on and any temperature monitoring system must have failed to alert or shut off the ranco.
Or possibly not set up with the raco on the Apex with control of the ranco and the ranco failing on with a non thermostat heating element.
I still feel extremely comfortable with how I have them set up but obviously things happen, sorry again this happened.
Yes, my Inkbird is still on apex. If inkbird failed on mode, apex would turn on and off the outlet and alert me. If failed off, apex still alerts me for low temp.
I should put on another heater to an empty outlet in off mode should the latter happen. I can at least turn the outlet on to heat the tank if I'm out of town.
Wheels are spinning....
Ok... so here is what I know about the Ranco heater controller "failure".
It seems it WAS in cooling mode. This was NOT a factor with the Apex because anytime the threshold temp was reached the outlet shut off. Take the apex out of the equation there is no backup or fail safe control.
Now... the reason why I believe the tank survived from Sunday-Thursday was because the temp never went over 79. Thursday was an unusually hot day, so the tank likely crossed that line and this thing kicked in trying to cool it down from 80 when what it actually was doing was letting the one heater run forever with no chance of stopping.
So - how or why was it in cooling mode, I do not know. What I can tell you is when I go through the menu, set the temp, the unit of measure, the diff and then get to C1 and toggle it to H1 and click set, it throws me an E2 error. So it's likely that when I initially set this up and tried to set it to H1 it just didn't save and I didn't realize because the Apex was policing it.
I re-read the manual and it was no help in clearing this E2 error so for now it's out of the mix. If anyone knows how I can fix this thing let me know, but I most just want to take a baseball bat to it.
It seems it WAS in cooling mode. This was NOT a factor with the Apex because anytime the threshold temp was reached the outlet shut off. Take the apex out of the equation there is no backup or fail safe control.
Now... the reason why I believe the tank survived from Sunday-Thursday was because the temp never went over 79. Thursday was an unusually hot day, so the tank likely crossed that line and this thing kicked in trying to cool it down from 80 when what it actually was doing was letting the one heater run forever with no chance of stopping.
So - how or why was it in cooling mode, I do not know. What I can tell you is when I go through the menu, set the temp, the unit of measure, the diff and then get to C1 and toggle it to H1 and click set, it throws me an E2 error. So it's likely that when I initially set this up and tried to set it to H1 it just didn't save and I didn't realize because the Apex was policing it.
I re-read the manual and it was no help in clearing this E2 error so for now it's out of the mix. If anyone knows how I can fix this thing let me know, but I most just want to take a baseball bat to it.
Similar threads
