Apex Locking up

[lazylivin]

My apex unit is locking up. Yesterday I put my hands in the tank and the water was cold. Display said the temperature was 78.3. I run it 78 - 78.5. I pushed the center button on the Apex and found it was locked up. Screen displayed PH and temp from the time that it locked up. Nothing had been turning on/off. None of the alarms went off, the entire unit was frozen and left all the outlets in their fall back state. I cycled the unit by unplugging it. It then resumed normal activity and showed a temperature of 75.7. OUCH! This morning I woke up same thing..... except this time temp was 69.2. Corals are not looking good. I moved my heaters to a different controller for now. What to do with the Apex. It is just over a year old. Am I going to have to layout for a new one or is their a repair service? I will give Neptune a call when they open back up from the Holidays but thought I would check to see if anyone has ever seen this issue before or had problem post warranty

[Ashlar]

First thing I'd do is grab the latest firmware. If that doesn't fix it, contact neptune- they're really good about support when you have a problem like this.

[lazylivin]

I will definitely try new firmware tonight. Hopefully that will help. The problem is I don't trust the system now. When it fails their is no indication of a problem.

[Steve]

That sucks Brian. Hope your corals recover. Seems like they should be OK if they weren't to cold for too long.

[Twizted1]

Wow, that's be whole point of the thing is to protect your system. What protects your system from it? Now this has me thinking. Keep us posted. If you need any timers or anything let me now. I have several.

[Bucknutz]

Will be interesting to see how Neptune responds to this.

[METZCOOL]

Had similar problem and this fixed it vs power cycling.

In some cases, resetting the AquaController Apex is needed for settings to take effect. The Restart function can be use as opposed to power cycling the Apex System. This option is only available from the Apex Display Module.
 
To Restart the Apex system:
Apex Display: System – Net Setup – Restart – push the Select Button. The Apex system will immediately restart.
Web Interface: This option is not available from the Web Interface.

[Wall_Tank]

Reduncdancy, Reduncancy, Redundancy.

I've probably had one or two lockups over the years I've had an apex.  If I had to guess, all of the reconfiguration of your system caused you to bump the aquabus connections which could have led to a bad connection.....check them out....then go to this address on your apex.   
http://whatever.apex.ip.address/cgi-bin/abdump.cgi

Manually refresh that page occasionally, look at the ecount column.   If a device is taking errors, then you need to look at that cable.   Although I had to have neptune tune my aquabus a long time ago.   My display does normally take some errors.....but I believe this is fairly normal.

What was your firmware version?  The version 4.30 is out, and has been very good for me.   I would upgrade to the latest version in any event.

1)  Use the backup power supply on the base module.  This allows provides a secondary power to the CPU, vs just the aquabus.  There are also separate power fail alarms.
2) Use a 3rd party monitoring service.  (I use Reeftronics)  This is a very simple logging server, but it will send you an email alert if your apex does not respond.
3) On your heaters, make sure to use a heater with an internal temperature control, Set the heater temp to just higher than you want your tank temperature.   Then use the apex to control the temperature.  Set the Fallback condition to your heater Outlet to ON, In the event of a communications problem with the base unit, there will still be heat.

[lazylivin]

I wouldn't be surprised if from all the work I did bump something which caused a issue or bad connection. I will check all of these things posted tonight/tomorrow to see if they help. Will keep you posted. Thanks for the offer of timers I am dusting some off to bring online until I can find and fix issue.

[itsalifestyle]

What a bummer Brian if you need anything let me know I have timer if needed also

[ohioreef]

I think you need to buy a new one and you can send your "junk" unit to me and I'll recycle it for you. 

[cbenner]

I've yet to have an issue with mine. I've been running it two years come this January. I have kept the firmware up to date also.
As Paul stated I use refftronix also as redundancy. 
Paul, what email setup are you using? I was using GMX but now that it has changed I haven't set mine back up yet.

Being a holiday weekend I might work on that for awhile.

[Wall_Tank]

I've yet to have an issue with mine. I've been running it two years come this January. I have kept the firmware up to date also.
As Paul stated I use refftronix also as redundancy. 
Paul, what email setup are you using? I was using GMX but now that it has changed I haven't set mine back up yet.

Being a holiday weekend I might work on that for awhile.

I use my att(yahoo) mail servers.  They still maintain servers that don't require encrypted traffic.   Fusion is supposed to solve that problem for the general masses.   But I never had problems with TimeWarner when I had road runner.

[cbenner]

I'm running Cincy bell.
Maybe it's time to upgrade to fusion.

 I believe they are running it beta at the moment.

Have you upgraded your firmware to fusion yet?

[Wall_Tank]

Here is another great service that is a redundancy.

http://www.reeftronics.net/

It polls your apex every 15 minutes.  If there is there is no response after 1 hour, you will get an email.

[lazylivin]

I have the latest firmware which is fusion ready but not in their beta program. We have a forum member that is running it and shared some screen shots. It looks really nice especially for those that have the apex compatible LED's.

Thanks for sharing the link Paul, I requested access.

[lazylivin]

It has been awhile so though I would update. Apex Support help me fix the issue. It was DDOS attacks on my IP. I had the Apex on the DMZ which made it vulnerable. Once I changed the port number all the issues went away. Regarding the heating issue. I added one heater to a external heater control which is powered by the Apex however Fallback is set to on. So if Apex has issue the outlet will hopefully honor the fallback position and turn the outlet on. The Ranco will then manage the temp. The second thing I did was setup the Apex to be monitored by http://www.reeftronics.net This is a great service they provide for free. Thank you Paul for telling me about it. I feel much more confident knowing if something goes wrong ReefTronics will text me.

[Ashlar]

Yeah, I kinda wish I'd done that for the signature generator, but I started that back in 2006; it wasn't so easy to send a text message back then.