hey guys, just unhappy with ecotech marine, super unhappy. figured one of the few options to get over it is probably to share the experience, and also to hopefully see what the exposure of the similar problem really is like, if you guys having similar experience ever bother to share.
i had been a happy customer of ecotech marine for years, for a 24 inch cube, i installed 3 radion lights (2x g2-pro, 1x g3-pro), 2 mp-10 pumps, and a backup battery, and a reef link which fails not all the time but only every time when i needed it. I have 2 tunze 6095 too controlled by tunze 7096, used to be 4, 2 front ones replaced with ecotech mp10s. the lights and pumps worked fine, except that each and everyone of them is louder than my skimmer or return pump or anything else on my tank or in my room, excluding my home theater of course. the other problem with them, not really a secret, is their software, i don't remember ever once i touched the software without a major problem. my advice is if you don't have a full day, don't touch them.
ok here's what happened. on july 29 2015 i finally got my hands on 2 units of mp-10 qd upgrade kits, the mp-10 pumps despite the size have been the most noisy things in my room for the past many years, closely behind are the radion lights, no other equipment is anywhere close to their noise levels, so i pre-ordered the 2 qd upgrade kits the moment they announced it, sometime in 2014 i believe. installation not quite eventful although software hassles are faithful to present themselves as expected anyway, in the ever consistent ecotech way. boy they're quite, i loved them, until they fell to the sandbed one after another hours after i left for a 3-4 day short vacation. my 2 tunze 6095 are basically covered and surrounded and blocked by over grown sps, the tank is basically left with no flow when the mp-10s fell to sand bed. and if i don't have 4 webcams pointing at my tank, and trusted ecosmart live, it said my pumps were working fine, it continued to drive the dry sides at 100% power i set.
had quite some email conversations with ecotech support, guys are nice, but i checked all the emails again, not a single time can i find any useful or constructive advice or instruction, just all kinds of questions, relevant or not, and finally some really good jokes. i found out by myself that the wet side tends to drop off in the pulsing mode when dramatic speed changes happen. after i found it out myself, that's couple weeks into my email conversation with ecotech, they suddenly remembered that there were "A COUPLE" pumps around our tiny little planet ever experienced similar problem when in pulsing mode, my poor understanding of english is that "A COUPLE" can in the most loose sense mean a bit more than 1 or 2, but should probably not mean dozens or hundreds. ecotech promises to investigate the problem and try solving it, i used my math skills learnt in primary school and did some calculation and suggested them the cheapest and easiest way to solve that issue with "A COUPLE" of pumps worldwide is, simply and stupidly, to replace them, to save the valuable time of their customer support reps and r&d engineers, and to save all the troubles that "couple of" customers are suffering, but they seem to have been taught a different math at primary school. so i removed all pulsing mode periods from my program, which is actually critically important to my way overstocked overgrown sps tank, and set the power to max at 80% down from 100% just to be safe, before i left for a 2-week trip to the middle of nowhere. to my total surprise they fell again, fortunately towards the end of the trip, tank left with no flow for 2 or 3 days, i got back home on august 23, some rtn but not the end of the world.
i reached out to ecotech marine support again telling them their pumps fell even without pulsing mode working at only 80% max power, and again i reminded them the lowest cost and highest customer sat way of "solving" this problem affecting "couple" units worldwide, is to replace them. guess what solution the genius there come up with? they ask me to ship the qd upgrade kits i bought in shanghai on july 29 2015 and fell to sand bed on august 1 2015, and i guess also the pump heads i bought years ago also in shanghai, to their Singapore distributor for "troubleshooting", and he promised their Singaporean distributor will be able to diagnose the pumps and repair them and return to me, trying to convince me the distributor is more capable than themselves. i'm as of the time of writing still waiting for a power strap shipped to me in shanghai from Singapore out on august 25 or 12 days ago, having no idea when it's going to arrive, i understand it's not easy for a power strap to swim across the south china sea, but i doubt if the mp10 pumps will swim any faster. so i replied and asked the genius at ecotech if his chinese vendor asks him to ship their newly locally bought miserably and repetitively failing device to say Ecuador for troubleshooting and repair, would he do it? that marks the end of my conversation with ecotech, i have a bunch of tv channels when i needed good jokes.
early next week i'm leaving again for the us, for 2 weeks. guess i won't be able to sleep with these pumps on my tank so i dug out the old white mp-10-ND noisy-drive drivers, and upgraded from qd to nd (of course it's an upgrade, from a pump that falls to one that does not). with the usual familiar software hurdles it took me only 3 hours this time to get them work again, if you're interested i'm happy to share how i bricked them, googled the net, recovered them, have reef link found them and lost them, having them showing "RF_STATUS OFF" while controllable in ecosmart live demo mode (these things are quite spiritual they can communicate with no RF no cable, maybe through "vibration" or "quantum") but not in program mode, ...., anyway, ecotech customers are probably already too used to these wonders.
now I'm a happy customer again, upgrading from the latest quiet-drive to the years old noisy-drive, with piece of mind that my pumps wouldn't drop to sand bed when i'm out of town, yahoo! If they do drop again, I promise I'll glued them on the front door of ecotech and post the picture of that everywhere on the web, yes i'm serious, how can i be not after all these, and if some more
i had been a happy customer of ecotech marine for years, for a 24 inch cube, i installed 3 radion lights (2x g2-pro, 1x g3-pro), 2 mp-10 pumps, and a backup battery, and a reef link which fails not all the time but only every time when i needed it. I have 2 tunze 6095 too controlled by tunze 7096, used to be 4, 2 front ones replaced with ecotech mp10s. the lights and pumps worked fine, except that each and everyone of them is louder than my skimmer or return pump or anything else on my tank or in my room, excluding my home theater of course. the other problem with them, not really a secret, is their software, i don't remember ever once i touched the software without a major problem. my advice is if you don't have a full day, don't touch them.
ok here's what happened. on july 29 2015 i finally got my hands on 2 units of mp-10 qd upgrade kits, the mp-10 pumps despite the size have been the most noisy things in my room for the past many years, closely behind are the radion lights, no other equipment is anywhere close to their noise levels, so i pre-ordered the 2 qd upgrade kits the moment they announced it, sometime in 2014 i believe. installation not quite eventful although software hassles are faithful to present themselves as expected anyway, in the ever consistent ecotech way. boy they're quite, i loved them, until they fell to the sandbed one after another hours after i left for a 3-4 day short vacation. my 2 tunze 6095 are basically covered and surrounded and blocked by over grown sps, the tank is basically left with no flow when the mp-10s fell to sand bed. and if i don't have 4 webcams pointing at my tank, and trusted ecosmart live, it said my pumps were working fine, it continued to drive the dry sides at 100% power i set.
had quite some email conversations with ecotech support, guys are nice, but i checked all the emails again, not a single time can i find any useful or constructive advice or instruction, just all kinds of questions, relevant or not, and finally some really good jokes. i found out by myself that the wet side tends to drop off in the pulsing mode when dramatic speed changes happen. after i found it out myself, that's couple weeks into my email conversation with ecotech, they suddenly remembered that there were "A COUPLE" pumps around our tiny little planet ever experienced similar problem when in pulsing mode, my poor understanding of english is that "A COUPLE" can in the most loose sense mean a bit more than 1 or 2, but should probably not mean dozens or hundreds. ecotech promises to investigate the problem and try solving it, i used my math skills learnt in primary school and did some calculation and suggested them the cheapest and easiest way to solve that issue with "A COUPLE" of pumps worldwide is, simply and stupidly, to replace them, to save the valuable time of their customer support reps and r&d engineers, and to save all the troubles that "couple of" customers are suffering, but they seem to have been taught a different math at primary school. so i removed all pulsing mode periods from my program, which is actually critically important to my way overstocked overgrown sps tank, and set the power to max at 80% down from 100% just to be safe, before i left for a 2-week trip to the middle of nowhere. to my total surprise they fell again, fortunately towards the end of the trip, tank left with no flow for 2 or 3 days, i got back home on august 23, some rtn but not the end of the world.
i reached out to ecotech marine support again telling them their pumps fell even without pulsing mode working at only 80% max power, and again i reminded them the lowest cost and highest customer sat way of "solving" this problem affecting "couple" units worldwide, is to replace them. guess what solution the genius there come up with? they ask me to ship the qd upgrade kits i bought in shanghai on july 29 2015 and fell to sand bed on august 1 2015, and i guess also the pump heads i bought years ago also in shanghai, to their Singapore distributor for "troubleshooting", and he promised their Singaporean distributor will be able to diagnose the pumps and repair them and return to me, trying to convince me the distributor is more capable than themselves. i'm as of the time of writing still waiting for a power strap shipped to me in shanghai from Singapore out on august 25 or 12 days ago, having no idea when it's going to arrive, i understand it's not easy for a power strap to swim across the south china sea, but i doubt if the mp10 pumps will swim any faster. so i replied and asked the genius at ecotech if his chinese vendor asks him to ship their newly locally bought miserably and repetitively failing device to say Ecuador for troubleshooting and repair, would he do it? that marks the end of my conversation with ecotech, i have a bunch of tv channels when i needed good jokes.
early next week i'm leaving again for the us, for 2 weeks. guess i won't be able to sleep with these pumps on my tank so i dug out the old white mp-10-ND noisy-drive drivers, and upgraded from qd to nd (of course it's an upgrade, from a pump that falls to one that does not). with the usual familiar software hurdles it took me only 3 hours this time to get them work again, if you're interested i'm happy to share how i bricked them, googled the net, recovered them, have reef link found them and lost them, having them showing "RF_STATUS OFF" while controllable in ecosmart live demo mode (these things are quite spiritual they can communicate with no RF no cable, maybe through "vibration" or "quantum") but not in program mode, ...., anyway, ecotech customers are probably already too used to these wonders.
now I'm a happy customer again, upgrading from the latest quiet-drive to the years old noisy-drive, with piece of mind that my pumps wouldn't drop to sand bed when i'm out of town, yahoo! If they do drop again, I promise I'll glued them on the front door of ecotech and post the picture of that everywhere on the web, yes i'm serious, how can i be not after all these, and if some more
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