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Today on BRStv we have episode twelve of our Neptune apex series and we are going to go
over the control light option in apex fusion.
Hi I'm Ryan host of BRStv where each week we cover a new topic related to reefing. This
week we are going to go over the light option found in the control type drop when programing
an outlet on the apex fusion cloud interface.
Selecting light option will preload a bunch of fields most people would commonly use for
controlling any type of light. For this video we will focus on your primary lights for the
aquarium. The first option is fallback and is asking if the energy bar were to ever get
disconnected from the apex base unit would you want the outlet to default to on or off?
In this case we would want the light to default to off so we don't cook the corals if we were
away for a few days and this was to happen.
Next option is the on time, select the time you want the light to come on. Depending on
the type of tank and lighting it is common for most people to maintain a lighting period
between eight and twelve hours. Most people who are closer to twelve have lights that
are capable of gradually increasing throughout the day and dimming over the evening. They
might also have multiple sets of lights where the halides are on for eight hours and some
less intense lights like t5's are on for dawn and dusk.
The day light cycle also doesn't have to match actual day time at your house either. I suggest
figuring out a schedule that matches your lifestyle so the lights are on when you are
home. For the sake of the video I am just going to select nine o'clock. The time is
displayed on a twenty four hour clock so if I want to turn the lights off at eight pm
I would enter twenty here.
The next option is shutdown probe. This is a feature that is capable of turning off your
lights based on the temperature of your tank. Lights can be one of the biggest sources of
heat in the tank so if the tank were to overheat because it was a hot day, your chiller failed
or someone turned off your homes AC this could save the tank by turning off the lights, you
could of coarse also set up an email alarm to notify you as well.
Most of you will only have one option and it will say temp. I have a second option showing
here because I have two temp probes on the system, the one labeled x5 is attached to
my pm2 salinity module and not the one we want to use in this case. Select the one that
says just temp.
Shut down value is the temp where I want it to turn off the lights. This is up to you
but most people will likely set it one to two degrees above where they want their take
to be. In this case I am going to set it to 80 degrees.
If this is your first time programing a controller hysteresis might be a somewhat foreign word
to you and certainly how it applies here. Basically this is just how long you want to
keep the light off once the controller triggers a shutdown based on high temp. If there wasn't
a hysteresis option the light would just keep turning off and on as the tank goes from 79.9
to 80 and then falls again. This would be pretty bad for your lights as well as be pretty
annoying visually. By default it says 30 minutes which means the lights will stay off for a
minimum of thirty minutes which makes much more sense.
Hit send to Apex and your light outlet will be programmed moments later. One thing you
should note is this control interface is really just writing command lines for you. If you
go back to the outlet you can see the lines of code it wrote for you by hitting the advanced
tab. If you would like to do something a bit more advanced like use the I/O switch box
to turn the on or off based on a hard button you could add some additional command lines
here, something we will come back to in the future.
If you have questions or advice for your fellow reefers checkout the comments area down below,
if this is your first time with us hit that subscribe button because we do this every
week, see ya next week with another episode of BRStv