I was able to get my hands on one of these through CoralVue. I am one of few people out there who are running 4 Gyre 280's, and they wanted to get some honest feedback and overall impressions on how it works for me.
A little backstory first. It was around the time that my good friends Carlos and Jeremy at CoralVue visited the new shop the first time about two years ago. At some point during the visit, I had asked Carlos if there was some kind of larger multiple "master" transformer that could run all 4 gyres. Or, if there was some way to consolidate the transformers at least so I could run one single plug rather than 4. We went back and forth with some ideas for a while. Ultimately never really came up with a good solution, but a seed was planted perhaps…
Now, I honestly don't know if those early conversations were the Genesis of this thing, or if it was already in the works. But let me just say, that I have been dreaming about something like the Wave Engine for a decade at least. As my controllers and power supply collections grew, so did the messes of tangled cables and cords. While I loved the pumps themselves, I HATED all the spaghetti and such that came along with DC pump/controller tech as it continued to be rolled out year after year.
As you can imagine I was really excited when I first heard of the release of the WaveEngine, but I was even more thrilled when Carlos said he was going to send me one to try out. So “it” existed and I was actually getting one! All that was left at this point, was that the darn thing had to work. I'll confess I was a little intimidated at first because programming pumps and apexes etc have never really come super easy to me, but the initial set up was simple. Locate the WaveEngine's internal signal WiFi in your phones WiFi list and connect. Then switch the WaveEngine over to your home WiFi and that was all I needed to do to get it online, plugged into the cloud and firmware updated.
Next, I was on to creating pumps, presets and triggers, and while I won't go into massive detail on this process, it was also a snap. Refreshingly. Ultimately there's really not a whole lot of water movement configurations that you can't do with this thing. I like to keep things simple, so I set up 4 pumps on the long sides of one of my 11' tanks and had them alternate every 5 minutes. I added a night mode where they calm down and Carlos walked me through creating a "hurricane" preset that runs all the pumps on full blast for 5 minutes every 30 minutes. Good flow has been a struggle in this tank particularly because of all the live rock, and how shallow the tank is. The water level is only about 7-8 inches and most of the coral is within an inch or two of the water surface. I had not been able to really deliver the kind of flow I needed in there using independent controllers. Either too much or not enough or stuck somewhere in between with some places getting blasted and other main areas stagnant. These simple settings I am using now have proven to provide strong (but not too strong) flow in all needed areas of the tank far better than anything I have tried yet.
I think this little box is super cool and without a doubt the solution to many little quirks and ticks I've had regarding flow and ongoing cord messes that I truly hate. There's a lot of things it does that I really like. They did extremely well designing the interface and overall intuitiveness of the programming process. I'm hoping that the guys from CoralVue can chime in and help me out if any of you have questions I can’t answer but I'll do the best I can. Thanks again to CoralVue and HYDROS for letting me try this out.
Believe me when I say the WaveEngine coming into my life, was literally like a dream coming true.
A little backstory first. It was around the time that my good friends Carlos and Jeremy at CoralVue visited the new shop the first time about two years ago. At some point during the visit, I had asked Carlos if there was some kind of larger multiple "master" transformer that could run all 4 gyres. Or, if there was some way to consolidate the transformers at least so I could run one single plug rather than 4. We went back and forth with some ideas for a while. Ultimately never really came up with a good solution, but a seed was planted perhaps…
Now, I honestly don't know if those early conversations were the Genesis of this thing, or if it was already in the works. But let me just say, that I have been dreaming about something like the Wave Engine for a decade at least. As my controllers and power supply collections grew, so did the messes of tangled cables and cords. While I loved the pumps themselves, I HATED all the spaghetti and such that came along with DC pump/controller tech as it continued to be rolled out year after year.
As you can imagine I was really excited when I first heard of the release of the WaveEngine, but I was even more thrilled when Carlos said he was going to send me one to try out. So “it” existed and I was actually getting one! All that was left at this point, was that the darn thing had to work. I'll confess I was a little intimidated at first because programming pumps and apexes etc have never really come super easy to me, but the initial set up was simple. Locate the WaveEngine's internal signal WiFi in your phones WiFi list and connect. Then switch the WaveEngine over to your home WiFi and that was all I needed to do to get it online, plugged into the cloud and firmware updated.
Next, I was on to creating pumps, presets and triggers, and while I won't go into massive detail on this process, it was also a snap. Refreshingly. Ultimately there's really not a whole lot of water movement configurations that you can't do with this thing. I like to keep things simple, so I set up 4 pumps on the long sides of one of my 11' tanks and had them alternate every 5 minutes. I added a night mode where they calm down and Carlos walked me through creating a "hurricane" preset that runs all the pumps on full blast for 5 minutes every 30 minutes. Good flow has been a struggle in this tank particularly because of all the live rock, and how shallow the tank is. The water level is only about 7-8 inches and most of the coral is within an inch or two of the water surface. I had not been able to really deliver the kind of flow I needed in there using independent controllers. Either too much or not enough or stuck somewhere in between with some places getting blasted and other main areas stagnant. These simple settings I am using now have proven to provide strong (but not too strong) flow in all needed areas of the tank far better than anything I have tried yet.
I think this little box is super cool and without a doubt the solution to many little quirks and ticks I've had regarding flow and ongoing cord messes that I truly hate. There's a lot of things it does that I really like. They did extremely well designing the interface and overall intuitiveness of the programming process. I'm hoping that the guys from CoralVue can chime in and help me out if any of you have questions I can’t answer but I'll do the best I can. Thanks again to CoralVue and HYDROS for letting me try this out.
Believe me when I say the WaveEngine coming into my life, was literally like a dream coming true.
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