Program for alarm changes itself

[dougc]

I installed my new Apex right before I left for vacation two weeks ago. Everything behaved normally until yesterday morning (the day we were flying home). I started getting email alarms, which indicated that the following statement was triggering the alarm:

If Temp < 7.80 Then ON

This made no sense for two reasons. First, the statement makes no sense unless I am running an arctic tank. Second, the temperature at the time was 78.0.

When I arrived home, I looked at the programming for both "SndAlarm" and "EmailAlarm", which both should have contained the following:

Set OFF
Defer 001:00 Then ON
If Temp > RT+1.6 Then ON
If Temp < RT+-2.0 Then ON
If Power EB8_Circuit2 Off 000 Then ON
If Power Apex Off 001 Then ON
If Outlet vWaterLow = ON Then ON
If pH < 07.80 Then ON

In both cases, it read this:

If Temp < 07.80 Then ON

At first I thought maybe I had done this when I programmed the outlets, so I corrected the statement. Since my pH was actually a quite low 7.75 (two weeks of neglect), I expected the alarm to begin sounding, but it did not, I went back into the program for the outlets and both had reverted to "Temp" instead of pH. I have corrected this again and will keep an eye on it.

Two questions:

1. Why did the program change itself?

2. Why, if it did, would the alarm sound and send email when the temperature was much higher than the threshold for the alarm?

I think that the alarm may have actually been reporting the low pH, but the stored program is getting corrupted somehow.

Has anyone seen this before?

[RussM]

That's a known intermittent bug. There is a known solid workaround though. Change the name of the pH probe to anything other than 'pH', like 'pH_Tank' or 'Sump_pH', then go change all applicable programming to match.

[Ben Nicholls]

Thanks, I'm hitting the same issue myself. Unfortunately this work around does not seem to fix it for my. It still changes it to temp. I've tried renaming it to pH-Sump and pH_Sump.

That's a known intermittent bug. There is a known solid workaround though. Change the name of the pH probe to anything other than 'pH', like 'pH_Tank' or 'Sump_pH', then go change all applicable programming to match.

[Ben Nicholls]

I finally got it to work by hand typing the line at the top (no copy and paste). It would continually change pH to temp when entered at the bottom.

[RussM]

I finally got it to work by hand typing the line at the top (no copy and paste). It would continually change pH to temp when entered at the bottom.Do you mean that you added the If pH line above your other programming? If so, it probably won't work. Post all of the programming for the outlet in question please.

[Ben Nicholls]

Yep, and it appears to be working fine. It alerted me on pH last night. No matter what I did if the pH lines were entered at the bottom they changed to Temp. Retyping them right below the Set command was the only way I got them to stay.


Here's the SndALM

Set OFF
If pH_Sump > 08.30 Then ON
If pH_Sump < 07.60 Then ON
If Temp > RT+2.9 Then ON
If Temp < RT+-0.9 Then ON


and the EmailAlm

Set OFF
If pH_Sump > 08.30 Then ON
If pH_Sump < 07.60 Then ON
If Temp > RT+2.9 Then ON
If Temp < RT+-0.9 Then ON
If Switch2 OPEN Then ON

[swearint]

That will work. Russ was concerned about priority. Since the Apex executes code top to bottom, later commands have higher priority. In otherwords, the last TRUE statement determines the final state of the outlet.

Whenever I have had this issue, I just kept trying and checking. I'd hit the update button, switch to a different outlet, then come back and check. Repeat.

Todd

[RussM]

Todd was right on about me thinking of statement execution order. In your case, it's ok. But if it were a dosing pump outlet for example, it would not have worked as expected.

[Ben Nicholls]

Another odd thing about it is once I got it to stick at the top of the program I could cut and past it lower and it worked fine. A lot of update/go to another outlet/come back to make sure it stuck.

For the regular outlets it never seem to change the pH statements. I have on in my dosing pump outlet (at the bottom) and never had any problem with it changing to temp.

Anyway my programming looks like all is functioning great. I am still dialing in my dosing pump timing and I'll probably add some more fail safe and alert statements once I decide what I want.