Got my pump about 30 minutes ago.
Overall seems to be decently made, I would say B class components. Price around $150-200 would be better suited. Of course I do not really agree with Tunze or Vortech prices as well
One potential issue out of the box for some is a short cable from the pump to the controller. Did not measure it exactly, but I would say it is around 6 feet long. In my case I mount it on right side of 180g tank and have to run it full length of the tank and then down the left side to get into the sump. cord can barely make it to the other side, shy about 5". Obviously this is not a good place to plop a controller so will have to figure something else out. Either some sort of extension cord or drill a whole in the back of the stand so I could just run it straight down into the sump area.
As far as noise goes, I would say it is fairly loud above 60-70%. My tank is not super quite, but I can hear the hum coming from the powerhead fairly easy. Perhaps that will break in, however manual says that they come pre-broken in
so will see about that. In either case, if you plan to run it at constant speed or in pulse/alternating mode with fairly large delta this should not be very bothersome for most people. With short pulses change in sound from off to on become rather noticeable and will likely upset most users.
Flow. It does move a fair amount of water, especially at higher speeds, but it breaks off around 4-5' mark. There is still movement all the way on the other end of 6' tank, but it is definitely much slower. I will leave two Tunze 6095s on that side for now. Pulsing mode seems potentially nice, although you lose a lot of flow here especially at lower deltas as water is pushed for a short amount of time and doesn't make that far, plus noise issue becomes more apparent. Alternate flow mode may be more useful with a better controller that could set individual intervals for forward and reverse modes. As it is, reverse mode is rather weak and blasts corals right under the pump, so at least in my setup it would not work. For now I'm just using constant flow with some variation provided by two tunzes on the opposite side.
Controller is pretty basic, but easy to use. Set up was straightforward. Press cycle button to switch between 4 modes (Constant, Pulse, Alternate, Feed). In each press settings button to change values, for modes with multiple settings pressing button again moves you to the next variable. Settings are however very basic. In constant mode you can select from one of the 10 or so speeds, In pulse you select speed and time (same time for on and off, so on 1 sec, off 0.5 sec is not possible), same in alternate mode. Not sure how feed mode works as far as going back to normal operation as of yet, but you have to cycle through the modes to get to it as it is not a separate button. Overall the controller should be ok for now, but Apex connection would definitely be welcome in the future.
