“Mixed review
Firstly, it is a great little machine! I have been using I for just over a month and it is maintaining alk at about 8.1 with the auto program and dosing salts that came with the kit. Tank is happy and seeing good colouration and growth with corals already! In this regard it is doing exactly what it is intended to do.
The good points
It's a small compact unit , relatively well made and so far has worked as expected with good results. The dosing salts are great (Ca, Kh & trace) and ultimately has taken away the need to manually adjust dosing amounts of additives that I used to use via a standalone doser using RF123+
Bad points
It has technically failed twice, but only because of what I would say is poor quality hoses within the unit itself. These are thin silicone hoses that connect all the pumps together and then fall from the front of the unit to allow easy coupling connection to the tank lines. However 2 of the hoses coming from the front of the machine have split on me twice, meaning a dosing line (trace) and the reagent feed to the analysis have both needed to be trimmed and fixed in the last month. This may not necessarily have happened however it is recommended you caibrate the pumps every 2 weeks - this constant opening and closing of the unit and interaction around the lines will undoubtedly mean that these hoses will probably continue to split - my recommendation would be to buy some better quality hoses and replace them all before you start using the machine - I will be looking to do this next time I need to calibrate the unit! (Or xepta - put better ones in and save people the job!)
Other bad point (and very annoying point at that!) Is the interaction between the unit and the app. Calibration is easy enough, and he app itself is "ok" from a usability perspective. The main frustration is the firmware updates. I've had 2 in the last month I've been using he machine and both times it has completely reset the machine and wiped all data from previous analysis. This basically means recalibrating the whole unit each time and also the auto program stops working until it recalculates the required doses for the tank after several analysis of consumption (24 hours later I am still waiting for this process to finish and start the dosing again) - issue here is that whilst the unit has been maintaining alk perfectly for a month, the lack of auto dosing has now meant my alk has dropped to 6.7 in the last 24 hours and will continue to do so until the unit starts dosing again. I'm not a programmer, but surely there must be a way on applying a firmware update that does not then impact the continued (very effective) operation of the machine - very annoying!
All in all, a great machine that does what it is meant to . With the above considerations it would have got 5 stars, well worth the investment and I will be awaiting the abex to launch in the UK”
