Apex vs ReefKeeper?
- Thread starter Masedaddy
- Start date
There's a LOT of information out there about Apex vs. Reefkeeper, so I'll not recount all of it here. I don't think you've met Joe (RTMA) our president. But you will if you come to our meeting this month. If so, you need to ask him about his little "incident" with his ReefKeeper. Almost cost him his whole tank. IMO controllers are WAY too critical for going cheap on, and ReefKeepers are the cheap option.
I've got no experience with ReefKeepers, but have been using Neptune Controllers for years. Apex - their most recent line of controllers is (IMO) less reliable than their prior controllers. However, it's reliable enough. I've never seen one do something that it's not supposed to do (turn something on when its supposed to be off, or visa versa). Never. But I have seen them fail - basically lock up until a reboot/reset. And when that happened, it was not a spontaneous lock up - like all of a sudden. Instead it was immediately upon a change in the programming. But that was a VERY uncommon event, and about the worst thing I can say about them.
To their credit, they give you the ability to easily back up your programming. So if you do that before any change - if in the very unlikely event that the change causes a problem - restoring to the old settings takes less than a minute.
Also, they have a really nice feature called "Fallback". For every socket you get to set whether its default state should be off or on. So in that rare instance when mine locked up, all the sockets resorted to their "fallback" state. So my skimmer was on, my return was on. But my Alk, Cal, and MG pumps were off. And my ATO was off.
So PLEASE don't think I'm trying to paint a picture of them being unreliable. Far from it. They are great, and I love them! I'm just pointing out that even as good as Apex's are, they are not perfect. Problems do happen on rare occasion. But they are designed to work well even in the unlikely event a problem does happen. I'm not sure if ReefKeepers can make that same claim. From what I've read, ReefKeepers are less reliable, and don't have near the quality of customer support Neptune provide. But don't take my word for it... ask Joe.
I've got no experience with ReefKeepers, but have been using Neptune Controllers for years. Apex - their most recent line of controllers is (IMO) less reliable than their prior controllers. However, it's reliable enough. I've never seen one do something that it's not supposed to do (turn something on when its supposed to be off, or visa versa). Never. But I have seen them fail - basically lock up until a reboot/reset. And when that happened, it was not a spontaneous lock up - like all of a sudden. Instead it was immediately upon a change in the programming. But that was a VERY uncommon event, and about the worst thing I can say about them.
To their credit, they give you the ability to easily back up your programming. So if you do that before any change - if in the very unlikely event that the change causes a problem - restoring to the old settings takes less than a minute.
Also, they have a really nice feature called "Fallback". For every socket you get to set whether its default state should be off or on. So in that rare instance when mine locked up, all the sockets resorted to their "fallback" state. So my skimmer was on, my return was on. But my Alk, Cal, and MG pumps were off. And my ATO was off.
So PLEASE don't think I'm trying to paint a picture of them being unreliable. Far from it. They are great, and I love them! I'm just pointing out that even as good as Apex's are, they are not perfect. Problems do happen on rare occasion. But they are designed to work well even in the unlikely event a problem does happen. I'm not sure if ReefKeepers can make that same claim. From what I've read, ReefKeepers are less reliable, and don't have near the quality of customer support Neptune provide. But don't take my word for it... ask Joe.
