MH to LED

[FishTruck]

To my great shame and poor planning, I decided to buy another two ecotech radions for my seven foot tank. I bought two of them about three months ago to replace two 400 w metal halide lights. The corals have done well and I like the look of the tank better under the radions.

What I forgot... what the agony of trying to get the wireless Sh>tbox known as reeflink to control said lights. This winter, I had to take a day off work to spend on support to finally get them to work... and I have not touched them since. Being penny wise and pound foolish, I replace half the lights with radions, and waited until this week to buy another two - thinking it would be less painful to pay 1400 dollars twice rather than 2800 dollars at once. I did not take adequate account of what kind of hell one goes through with each new ecotech purchase - which is getting the things programmed.

So, I plug my two lights in, with the promise... that THIS time, all I have to do is plug them in, and the reeflink and ecosmart live account and hardware will all magically find each other... and setup will be easy this time.

Well.. it's not. I am going to have to schedule another day off of work to get this crap to work. The setup on these lights is SO SO SO SO painful. I am going to sit and try to update firmware, and manage my three login accounts and try try try not go get a sledgehammer and smash all this crap to bits while I pray that some guy in India will "take control of account" and send me an email file with the new firmware update that I can manually load into the sh"tbox known as reeflink and reboot seven or twelve times, until I can get my new lights to work. I am close to scrapping the whole tank. Seven years into this tank... I am looking to make it EASIER to manage... NOT to make a new hobby out of one component (the lighting system in this case).

 

[FishTruck]

Seriously... I have taken this tank through leaks, power outages, bleached corals, missing fish, ich... and the only time I have felt this helpless and dejected is due to the Fing wireless I/T and "now it all has to have an online account to work properly" BS.

 

[dave.m]

What have you learned on the actual programming of these lights that you can share with the community, or did you let some online tech do it for you?

Dave.M

 

[cas1069]

welcome to the LED world, I too had a problem with my LEDs on my tank but thanks to great ppl on reef central we got past it and they are working great now. so put away the hammer and regroup, if you haven't try posting details of the help you need and maybe someone who has had them in the past can help you solve them this time

 

[ca1ore]

No experience with radions, but hooking up my Kessil lights and programming through apex couldn't have been easier.

 

[Sonicboom]

Sorry to hear about the unfriendly programming of the radions, I have seen this first hand with a friends tank and how many hours he spent just trying to get the light to get recognized. He was not very happy when i received my Hydra 52, powered it up, detected it and flashed the firmware and had it mounted in under 5 min.

 

[FishTruck]

Well, I finally got them to work. I had to type out a script of instructions for myself.

I was making a mistake, re-establishing the connection between my reef link and computer which was unnecessary and the wrong thing to do upon plugging in new radions. The instructions are just bad and the system connections are not intuitive. Ecotech thinks that they are apple, and they are not. Just plugging the stuff together is not sufficient.

Basically, you have to log into your account on the "ECOSMART LIVE" website NOT the ecotech website. Just plug in the new radions, log into "ecosmart live" and your account and you should be good.

Now that I have cooled down seven months later, I have to say that I do love the lights, the programming modes, etc... are great.

Also, my advice might be out of date. Once I got it working... I have been afraid to touch anything. I am going to log in and dim the lights to put in some anthias tonight. Wish me luck.

 

[slief]

No experience with radions, but hooking up my Kessil lights and programming through apex couldn't have been easier.

Ain't that the truth.. It took just minutes to have them all setup and dialed in. Best of all, my corals love the Kessils and even the new SPS I've put in are growing like weeds. Even better is that I have no supplemental lighting. That said, the Radions are great lights and I bet it would have been much easier setting them up with a Apex and a WXM module compared to Reef Link but I guess I could be wrong.

 

[Socaltoaz]

Reef link is a pain and I agree the instructions suck. But once you get it done, it's super easy.

 

[FloformAustria]

instructions aren´t good i give you that, but after a few tries i got mine working and made all the updates to my old vortech mp10 and now it just works perfect!!

 

[A1t2o]

You could just do what I'm doing. Design and build your own controller (with the help of my brother the engineer) out of an Arduino base. In the end I will have each color channel controlled by a on time and %, ramp time, end %, then back down as I choose, all set at the display. The controller will also do my heater, fans, fuge light, and whatever else I can fit into the rest of the 8 outlets and 5 PWM outputs. Plus, if I'm ever unhappy about it, then I'll just reprogram it to do whatever I want or add components for any upgrades I want. I'm thinking about an internet module with a static IP address for me to monitor or make changes to.

Not saying this is the easier approach but it will get the job done and reprogramming for any changes in my lighting is going to be fairly simple.

 

[FishTruck]

Funny, I am using an old Neptune controller, which used to do everything

Now... I've got the reef link on the lights, I've got the Maxspect Gyres doing their own thing, heaters on a second old reeflink in the basement, float valves that work independantly, and even a couple of hardware store timers to run the RO system - CHAOS

I do like the pre-programmed schedules in reeflink live. I realized... I had been running way to many hours of light when I was doing Metal Halide. I'm not sure if I could replicate that very easily with another controller or not.