Reef Angel Forum

Okay I've posted before how my reefangel will randomly turn things off and wont let me turn them back on until I unplug the relay box. Well last night I removed a bunch of sand from my tank and the water level was low. I manually turned off the ATO so it wont kick on and empty my ATO water into my tank. I also turned off 1 of my 2 return pumps. Wouldn't you know it this morning both my return pumps are running and 7 gallons of ATO found its way into the tank. The controller that was supposed to make my life easier gives me nothing but headcahes all the time. Is there a step by step how this thing works? This is how it works (at least in my head)

Controller turns on and enables all the ports setup in code
Controller runs though the loop turning on and off relays etc
User disables one of the relays manually
Controller keeps running though the loop but will no longer be able to turn on the disabled port
Person using the controller is happy because 7g of ATO water doesn't get dumped into the tank and his 2nd return pump doesn't burn itself out due to not enough water being in the tank.

^ Am I off in that thinking?

Yes that is exactly how it works, but here is what I think it happened.
You manually turned off a port. The controller sensed a lock up and rebooted itself to prevent it from happening.
When the controller rebooted, it turned itself into default mode and your manual override was lost in the reboot process.
That's why the ATO came back on.
The most likely cause of the controller rebooting itself is Koralia pumps being used as wavemaker.
Do you have wavemaker in your code? I'm not saying you can't use. I'm just noting that it may cause an unintended reboot to prevent it from locking up.

Is there a problem unique to Koralia pumps on the wavemaker?

They seem to generate a nastier spike from what I've seen.
The dampening components are there to minimize, but every once in a while the spike is too great and causes interferences on the controller.

Interesting..I only have 2 power heads on the relay and they are both sicce 4 power heads. They are being used to turn on and off the power heads and random times though could that cause a reboot?

Any motor does spike when it is turned off.
It is the inertia of the motor that causes that.
This has a brief explanation about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snubber

With that being said there is no way to prevent my reefangel from restarting and overriding my manual turnoffs?

Can we run a test?
Do you have any port to spare?
If so, turn something off or on by overriding it and leave it like that.
Watch if they loose the override and how long it took them to revert back to default.
I'm interested in knowing how long it takes.