Neptune Apex System Fried?

Paul Kachirsky · Jun 14, 2024

Hi @_AV , I am hoping that you can help me. I was watching your videos on Youtube and I think that I have a good idea of what happened but you are the expert.

Below is my parts list and then the explanation.

Apex A2
EB832 Qty: 4
Trident Qty: 3
FMM Qty: 2
WXM

The other day I had a float switch fail on me and flooded the room with RODI water (10-15 gallons worth). It happened overnight and I woke up to splashing. When I shut off the water valve I noticed that all my EB832s were flashing. I also noticed that some of the LED output indicators where out while others were on. The plugs that showed no LED status indicator are not working and the plugs that show LED status indicator are working. At first I thought that maybe it could be the infamous 12v power supply but after thinking on it the LED indicators were always on with no power to all the plugs in the past when this was my issue. So I looked into things further. I noticed that my Apex head unit was not connected to Fusion so I did a restart, no luck. I tried the reset button to relink the Wi-Fi (waiting for the blue indicator light) that didn't work, it just cycled past the blue indicator and back to the orange indicator telling me it was back online with fusion, BUT it wasn't. So the Apex head unit isn't connecting to fusion (I cant get on apex.local either), the EB832s are not linking with the head unit (with the plug issues), the trident LED indicator is flashing orange and the modules have flashing indicators and are not connecting. I ordered a cat6 cable to try to connect the head unit with a hard line, I will have that today. I hope this allows me to get on fusion or apex.local so I can switch around plugs.

After looking online further I found a post from someone saying that they had a 1link cable spark and basically fry the system. You replied to it saying the 1link with 24v when shorted can short the 12v aquabus (Paraphrasing). After looking behind my sump there was a 1link cable on the stand floor that got wet (I am assuming) at the connection point since I was combining 1link cables to be able to reach my plugs. I am assuming that this is where the issue started? My Apex head unit, eb832s and modules are all off the ground and had no way to get wet but that 1link cable was on the ground. There was also a slightly wet connection point on my XR30 light that was behind the stand but I am not sure if that was the cause. Right now I am lucky that the plugs on my eb832s that are working are powering my pumps and heaters so the fish will be ok, however my lights are not working on any of my 3 tanks and I am concerned about my coral not having light for multiple days. I tried to plug in one of my lights to a working outlet to see if it will go on (the buttons did) but the light itself didn't turn on. My guess is because I have them programmed with the WXM and its based on the power outlet.

I did see that you mentioned that ICs VP232 (sn65hvd232D per ti spec based on topside marking) and MAX3059ASA are culprits. I ordered them since I am in the IC industry so I can get them tomorrow. I have the ability to solder them on from home. With my explanation above do you think this is my main problem? With some of the eb832 outlets working on mine vs the post from the other persons system I am not 100% sure what the true issues are. In what order would you replace them to insure I don't have any other issues?

I hope my explanation makes sense. I also wanted to thank you in advance for any time you can spare to assist. Thanks!

tzabor10 · Jun 15, 2024

Sounds unfortunate. I hope you get your electricity off the ground

_AV · Jun 19, 2024

All of this makes sense. If you get the 4 pin 1link cable wet, it will short the CAN transceiver as it carries 24v power wires and aquabus comm wires together. This will likely fry aquabus comm on all connected modules because neptune never bothered to isolate anything there. It can also damage the buck converter circuits that converts 24v to 12v. Which is what I hope happened to your head unit. Because otherwise you may have damaged the main controller on it and it's game over.
What I'd do is power the head unit separately with a 12v power supply and connect a display module over aquabus. If display shows any information, consider yourself lucky. If it doesn't, it can be an uphill battle.
The good news is that it looks like your head unit actually has some LEDs on and they are cycling correctly, (wifi connectivity issue aside). This means that at least some of the head unit is working.

PharmrJohn · Jun 19, 2024

Man, I have no idea what to do (as I've never worked with the unit), but I HAVE to issue my condolences. This just flat out sucks. I hope you can get it in some semblance of working order again.

Paul Kachirsky · Jun 19, 2024

_AV said:
All of this makes sense. If you get the 4 pin 1link cable wet, it will short the CAN transceiver as it carries 24v power wires and aquabus comm wires together. This will likely fry aquabus comm on all connected modules because neptune never bothered to isolate anything there. It can also damage the buck converter circuits that converts 24v to 12v. Which is what I hope happened to your head unit. Because otherwise you may have damaged the main controller on it and it's game over.
What I'd do is power the head unit separately with a 12v power supply and connect a display module over aquabus. If display shows any information, consider yourself lucky. If it doesn't, it can be an uphill battle.
The good news is that it looks like your head unit actually has some LEDs on and they are cycling correctly, (wifi connectivity issue aside). This means that at least some of the head unit is working.

Thanks for the reply. So I figured it out. I did get it back up and running. So, the MAX chip on the head unit was blown, badly. We took the chip off to solder on the new chip but the board was fried so bad that the tracers were gone. I ended up finding an A2 apex head unit on ebay and I bought it so I can take the top board out and use it on mine. I got it in and replaced it to no avail. The head unit was giving me a green light which was a hardware issue. I found people talking about the SD card as a possible culprit. I took the SD card off of the second board and copied all the data to my laptop as a backup and reinstalled it onto the board. When I was plugging in the wifi dongle I noticed that it was having trouble being inserted into the connector, so I grabbed the wifi dongle off of the unit I got on ebay, installed it and then I was back in business. The head unit gave me the blue led to connect it to my network and I was set after that. Your videos helped me a lot, so thanks. Here is what it looked like.
After I got it back online I plugged in my other power bars and modules 1 at a time and the rest was fine with no issues except for my autofeeder with no longer works. I am fortunate all things considered.

Paul Kachirsky · Jun 19, 2024

PharmrJohn said:
Man, I have no idea what to do (as I've never worked with the unit), but I HAVE to issue my condolences. This just flat out sucks. I hope you can get it in some semblance of working order again.

Thanks. I did get it running. I just made a detailed response above this reply.

braaap · Jun 19, 2024

The pictures of that fried board are exactly why I switched to hydros. That should have been stopped at an over current protection. But Neptune didn’t want to spend 10 cents on that.

These are traces burned out of an eb832. Neptune didn’t care that this could have burned down a house. Only reason it was caught was the smell. It wasn’t tripping anything.

Paul Kachirsky · Jun 19, 2024

braaap said:
The pictures of that fried board are exactly why I switched to hydros. That should have been stopped at an over current protection. But Neptune didn’t want to spend 10 cents on that.

These are traces burned out of an eb832. Neptune didn’t care that this could have burned down a house. Only reason it was caught was the smell. It wasn’t tripping anything.

That is insane. I like the system, but not having redundancy safety precautions on the designs is concerning.

braaap · Jun 19, 2024

Paul Kachirsky said:
That is insane. I like the system, but not having redundancy safety precautions on the designs is concerning.

Yup. And when I contacted them they didn’t care. They just offered me a discount of $40 on one.

_AV · Jun 20, 2024

Paul Kachirsky said:
Thanks for the reply. So I figured it out. I did get it back up and running. So, the MAX chip on the head unit was blown, badly. We took the chip off to solder on the new chip but the board was fried so bad that the tracers were gone. I ended up finding an A2 apex head unit on ebay and I bought it so I can take the top board out and use it on mine. I got it in and replaced it to no avail. The head unit was giving me a green light which was a hardware issue. I found people talking about the SD card as a possible culprit. I took the SD card off of the second board and copied all the data to my laptop as a backup and reinstalled it onto the board. When I was plugging in the wifi dongle I noticed that it was having trouble being inserted into the connector, so I grabbed the wifi dongle off of the unit I got on ebay, installed it and then I was back in business. The head unit gave me the blue led to connect it to my network and I was set after that. Your videos helped me a lot, so thanks. Here is what it looked like.
After I got it back online I plugged in my other power bars and modules 1 at a time and the rest was fine with no issues except for my autofeeder with no longer works. I am fortunate all things considered.

Looks pretty bad but I see it come in such conditions nearly daily. Traces can be repaired on these and the blown component replaced. The blown CAN transceiver further confirms the earlier suspicion that the shot came through the aquabus/1link cables. I'm actually surprised none of your other modules suffered the damage. Perhaps the short was in fact on aquabus and not 1link?
Either way, happy to see you got it working again.

_AV · Jun 20, 2024

braaap said:
The pictures of that fried board are exactly why I switched to hydros. That should have been stopped at an over current protection. But Neptune didn’t want to spend 10 cents on that.

These are traces burned out of an eb832. Neptune didn’t care that this could have burned down a house. Only reason it was caught was the smell. It wasn’t tripping anything.

Think of it for a minute

The house burning down concern aside, imagine that they implemented outlet shut down at over current (which they should because their traces clearly can't handle much of it for too long), then this would shut down something important in your tank like a pump or a heater. Your tank crashes and everyone starts a flurry of reviews how apex crashes their tanks all the time. Not good.

A small possibility of burning down the house vs a much more frequent possibility of crashing tanks... they made their call and put some legal language somewhere that you can't plug in devices that draw more than what the unit is rated for (tried and proven defense against insurance claims of power strips burning down houses)

Not defending Neptune at all. Only guessing as to their logic on this.

What drives me crazy with hydros is all the multicolor LEDs on them. They look like a dang Christmas tree when powered up. lol. If they had a more professional design to them... would be much more appealing.

braaap · Jun 20, 2024

_AV said:
Think of it for a minute The house burning down concern aside, imagine that they implemented outlet shut down at over current (which they should because their traces clearly can't handle much of it for too long), then this would shut down something important in your tank like a pump or a heater. Your tank crashes and everyone starts a flurry of reviews how apex crashes their tanks all the time. Not good.

A small possibility of burning down the house vs a much more frequent possibility of crashing tanks... they made their call and put some legal language somewhere that you can't plug in devices that draw more than what the unit is rated for (tried and proven defense against insurance claims of power strips burning down houses)

Not defending Neptune at all. Only guessing as to their logic on this.

What drives me crazy with hydros is all the multicolor LEDs on them. They look like a dang Christmas tree when powered up. lol. If they had a more professional design to them... would be much more appealing.

I get what you are saying. But they have burned down houses. Terrence Fuggazi is the highest profile fire caused by Neptune.

This wasn’t even an over draw or equipment failure. This was just straight Neptune failure.

You can turn off all the LEDs. I hate them as well and have mine off.