This is not a request for help, so much as it is a warning for others that may encounter this issue. This is also not an attack on neptune systems. I love(d) my dosers, apex, and their whole kit. I have not had any issues for the three years I have been using their products, and, until recently, would have died on the "I would not run a system without one" hill.
At present, I am 100% convinced there is a devastating software issue that arrived with the update adding support for the new dos QD and trident np, and it has not been fixed as of writing. I would not bother posting this for a minor issue: this has almost crashed my tank TWO TIMES, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only person affected by this issue.
I will explain as best I can the issue, but the short version is this: your doser or other gear may show up in fusion as "off", but continue running, never turning off.
I wouldn't believe me either, but I have plenty of evidence. So, I'll start from the top.
A couple months ago, I got some water into my doser somehow (100% my fault), and one of the dosing heads stopped working. Salt water + electronics don't mix, this is 100% on me. As such, I decided eh, there's a new model coming out in a month. I'll just replace this one with the new one, and put the calcium dosing on my jebao for now. No issues, and just waited for the new doser to arrive.
Once it did, I plugged in the doser and realized my Apex needed an update to be able to operate the new doser (makes sense). So I updated my apex firmware and popped the new doser on. Plug and play, very easy upgrade. No form factor changes either, so the old mounting solution worked fine. Only difference was more dark theme (I am a dark theme enjoyer, so I consider this an upgrade) and silent operation. Other than that, it was the same doser I've known and loved for several years.
Several days after the upgrade, I went down to the basement to check on things, and noticed one of the metal hallide lights was on. They are supposed to turn off at 3 pm, and it was past 3, so they should have been off... Opened fusion to turn off the light, and it showed as off, despite the fact it was on. I shrugged it off, toggled it to on in fusion, and back to auto. It promptly turned the light off, so I just went on with my day, thinking nothing more than that was weird.
A couple of days go by, and business as usual. Then, around 2 pm, I notice my pH has spiked up to ~9! I head down to see what's happening, and, to my shock and horror, the doser is dumping my NaOH based alkalinity solution into my sump, despite the fact that it did not appear to be on in fusion. I could not toggle the doser off, and I was forced to unplug it.
I immediately started recording video of the doser, and took some screenshots to capture the incident as best I could.
Video of the doser running: https://photos.app.goo.gl/CX6SX6vvA3PNTF6g7
and some screenshots proving it thinks it's off and the pH spike from the fact that it isn't:
In the doser log above, the important thing to note is that there are no registered doses during this duration, including the scheduled ones that would typically happen.
Very angry about the near disaster I averted here, I went to the BRS website and wrote a very negative review. This was an emotional decision, and I think I was justifiably angry here. They responded to this by creating a support ticket for me, and I was largely okay with this.
So I hear from Neptune support, and I sent them the video above, as well as the screenshots above. I wanted to give them as much information as possible to fix this, as it absolutely has the potential to kill an aquarium.
A few days later, I see a post on a facebook group where this happened to a very prominent reefer with a very large aquarium (he can identify himself if he so chooses, but I will not drag him into this without his permission). We'll just say it's someone you would probably know. He posted about some gear failing, and I ranted about this issue there... A few days later, it happens to him, and he has substantially more at risk than I. In a very justifiably angry post, he posted that he got bit by this bug, and there were several other apex users in the comments that also experienced this same issue.
In the interim, I had neptune support look into things, and they didn't see anything wrong. They said one of my alarm statements was incorrect (not sure how i did that, but they were correct about this... It has no relevance here, though). They also noticed the firmware to my old doser was out of date (which, yes... it certainly was. It was also unplugged, and on the floor next to the aquarium, so I don't see any relevance here). The last thing was there was another update to their operating system, so I performed that update as instructed by support. I also removed the module for my old doser, as it was not connected anymore.
I suspected that they fixed the issue hastily, pushed an update, and hoped nobody ran into it. So I just kept on, business as usual...
Then it happened last night. In the most unbelievably dumb-luck type of situation (miraculously so), my dosing line was not completely submerged into my dosing reservoir for the alkalinity. I was especially tired this morning (had a frag swap yesterday... I'm sure some of you know how exhausting that can be), and I slept in. I went down to check on the corals (as I typically do), and saw the doser had the blue light to indicate it was dosing. I've always stared at it when this was happening since the malfunction just to make sure it turned off. Several seconds go by, and my heart sinks. It was happening again, despite everything being up to date and every small, irrelevant configuration issue being "fixed."
This time, though, the doser had been dosing since 2:50 AM, and it was currently 11:40 am. Again, the dumbest of luck here... It fortunately was dosing air. This only damaged the doser itself (it's not supposed to be continuously operating for that long), and it now has a click that happens as it doses.
Again, I took a video (adding a very manual timestamp at the end by showing the time on my watch).
photos.app.goo.gl
Here's the log, where you can see the exact same thing happenenig (just a longer duration).
I am unbelievably lucky that the doser was only able to dose for ~30 minutes before it was in the air. While I personally don't worry that much if there's an isolated alkalinity spike, if I had dosed continuously for 9 hours, I would have lost everything in my aquarium.
I have reached out to neptune support again, to let them know this has happened, but I believe it's time to make other apex users aware of this issue. Please chime in if this has happened to you! The more people that report this, the more likely they will respond.
There are a few of very important takeaways from this that are critical to understand.
1. This is not user error. Everything is programmed correctly, as veryified by neptune support.
2. This is not an isolated incident. It has happened to several individuals, and three times now to me.
3. This affects more than just the new doser. This has happened to my lights as well, so I have no reason to believe it won't effect everything else as well.
4. There is no programming around this, and there are no workarounds. You cannot have a rule that turns off your doser if the pH / alk spikes. I have had to unplug the doser to stop it. I tried as best I could the second time to turn it off in fusion (I knew it was dosing air, so I wasn't too worried about taking my time here), but was not able to do so.
edit: there way be a workaround. Very important to note that I have not tried this, but think it has a good chance of working if you use a very high pH additive like NaOH. If you plug into the eb8, turn off the outlet via a rule like pH > 8. That should do it, but... personally won't be testing this.
I sincerely hope nobody reads this as "screw you neptune" or anything of the like. I'm a robotics engineer by trade, and I understand things happen. I just hope this makes the issue more visible to others, and I hope anyone who hasn't updated their apex since the release will continue to run their old firmware.
I also sincerely hope this gets fixed quickly, and Neptune stops pushing the latest updates out until it is fixed.
But, until then, I have switched my doser to a more reliable option (my trusty jebao dosers). I got entirely too lucky the first two times, and the law of averages says I'm due for a total whipeout next time this bug happens.
At present, I am 100% convinced there is a devastating software issue that arrived with the update adding support for the new dos QD and trident np, and it has not been fixed as of writing. I would not bother posting this for a minor issue: this has almost crashed my tank TWO TIMES, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only person affected by this issue.
I will explain as best I can the issue, but the short version is this: your doser or other gear may show up in fusion as "off", but continue running, never turning off.
I wouldn't believe me either, but I have plenty of evidence. So, I'll start from the top.
A couple months ago, I got some water into my doser somehow (100% my fault), and one of the dosing heads stopped working. Salt water + electronics don't mix, this is 100% on me. As such, I decided eh, there's a new model coming out in a month. I'll just replace this one with the new one, and put the calcium dosing on my jebao for now. No issues, and just waited for the new doser to arrive.
Once it did, I plugged in the doser and realized my Apex needed an update to be able to operate the new doser (makes sense). So I updated my apex firmware and popped the new doser on. Plug and play, very easy upgrade. No form factor changes either, so the old mounting solution worked fine. Only difference was more dark theme (I am a dark theme enjoyer, so I consider this an upgrade) and silent operation. Other than that, it was the same doser I've known and loved for several years.
Several days after the upgrade, I went down to the basement to check on things, and noticed one of the metal hallide lights was on. They are supposed to turn off at 3 pm, and it was past 3, so they should have been off... Opened fusion to turn off the light, and it showed as off, despite the fact it was on. I shrugged it off, toggled it to on in fusion, and back to auto. It promptly turned the light off, so I just went on with my day, thinking nothing more than that was weird.
A couple of days go by, and business as usual. Then, around 2 pm, I notice my pH has spiked up to ~9! I head down to see what's happening, and, to my shock and horror, the doser is dumping my NaOH based alkalinity solution into my sump, despite the fact that it did not appear to be on in fusion. I could not toggle the doser off, and I was forced to unplug it.
I immediately started recording video of the doser, and took some screenshots to capture the incident as best I could.
Video of the doser running: https://photos.app.goo.gl/CX6SX6vvA3PNTF6g7
and some screenshots proving it thinks it's off and the pH spike from the fact that it isn't:
In the doser log above, the important thing to note is that there are no registered doses during this duration, including the scheduled ones that would typically happen.
Very angry about the near disaster I averted here, I went to the BRS website and wrote a very negative review. This was an emotional decision, and I think I was justifiably angry here. They responded to this by creating a support ticket for me, and I was largely okay with this.
So I hear from Neptune support, and I sent them the video above, as well as the screenshots above. I wanted to give them as much information as possible to fix this, as it absolutely has the potential to kill an aquarium.
A few days later, I see a post on a facebook group where this happened to a very prominent reefer with a very large aquarium (he can identify himself if he so chooses, but I will not drag him into this without his permission). We'll just say it's someone you would probably know. He posted about some gear failing, and I ranted about this issue there... A few days later, it happens to him, and he has substantially more at risk than I. In a very justifiably angry post, he posted that he got bit by this bug, and there were several other apex users in the comments that also experienced this same issue.
In the interim, I had neptune support look into things, and they didn't see anything wrong. They said one of my alarm statements was incorrect (not sure how i did that, but they were correct about this... It has no relevance here, though). They also noticed the firmware to my old doser was out of date (which, yes... it certainly was. It was also unplugged, and on the floor next to the aquarium, so I don't see any relevance here). The last thing was there was another update to their operating system, so I performed that update as instructed by support. I also removed the module for my old doser, as it was not connected anymore.
I suspected that they fixed the issue hastily, pushed an update, and hoped nobody ran into it. So I just kept on, business as usual...
Then it happened last night. In the most unbelievably dumb-luck type of situation (miraculously so), my dosing line was not completely submerged into my dosing reservoir for the alkalinity. I was especially tired this morning (had a frag swap yesterday... I'm sure some of you know how exhausting that can be), and I slept in. I went down to check on the corals (as I typically do), and saw the doser had the blue light to indicate it was dosing. I've always stared at it when this was happening since the malfunction just to make sure it turned off. Several seconds go by, and my heart sinks. It was happening again, despite everything being up to date and every small, irrelevant configuration issue being "fixed."
This time, though, the doser had been dosing since 2:50 AM, and it was currently 11:40 am. Again, the dumbest of luck here... It fortunately was dosing air. This only damaged the doser itself (it's not supposed to be continuously operating for that long), and it now has a click that happens as it doses.
Again, I took a video (adding a very manual timestamp at the end by showing the time on my watch).
New video by Hunter Allen
photos.app.goo.gl
Here's the log, where you can see the exact same thing happenenig (just a longer duration).
I am unbelievably lucky that the doser was only able to dose for ~30 minutes before it was in the air. While I personally don't worry that much if there's an isolated alkalinity spike, if I had dosed continuously for 9 hours, I would have lost everything in my aquarium.
I have reached out to neptune support again, to let them know this has happened, but I believe it's time to make other apex users aware of this issue. Please chime in if this has happened to you! The more people that report this, the more likely they will respond.
There are a few of very important takeaways from this that are critical to understand.
1. This is not user error. Everything is programmed correctly, as veryified by neptune support.
2. This is not an isolated incident. It has happened to several individuals, and three times now to me.
3. This affects more than just the new doser. This has happened to my lights as well, so I have no reason to believe it won't effect everything else as well.
4. There is no programming around this, and there are no workarounds. You cannot have a rule that turns off your doser if the pH / alk spikes. I have had to unplug the doser to stop it. I tried as best I could the second time to turn it off in fusion (I knew it was dosing air, so I wasn't too worried about taking my time here), but was not able to do so.
edit: there way be a workaround. Very important to note that I have not tried this, but think it has a good chance of working if you use a very high pH additive like NaOH. If you plug into the eb8, turn off the outlet via a rule like pH > 8. That should do it, but... personally won't be testing this.
I sincerely hope nobody reads this as "screw you neptune" or anything of the like. I'm a robotics engineer by trade, and I understand things happen. I just hope this makes the issue more visible to others, and I hope anyone who hasn't updated their apex since the release will continue to run their old firmware.
I also sincerely hope this gets fixed quickly, and Neptune stops pushing the latest updates out until it is fixed.
But, until then, I have switched my doser to a more reliable option (my trusty jebao dosers). I got entirely too lucky the first two times, and the law of averages says I'm due for a total whipeout next time this bug happens.
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