AC Jr and power loss

[bowfront]

Every time we get a power outage the clock resets to 00:00 and the date back to Jan 01 1996. I thought there was some kind of internal battery back up for the clock. The timer programs are preserved but the datalog is lost. We had an outage last night and not only was the clock reset but my tank pH was reading 8.40 which is unheard of for the early morning. I have a feeling that the calibration was lost but I didn't have time to check.

Can you explain what kind of backup is built into the Jr and how long it is supposed to work? Would it be ok to plug the AC Jr into a UPS? That might solve the problem.

[clp]

There is an internal battery for the clock on the Jr. If the battery failed, I would expect the time to be a random value - not reset to the beginning of time. Sure you can plug the Jr into a UPS. Contact me at [email protected], and we'll get your Jr repaired.
The AC2 and ACPRO have 9V battery backup, and if these batteries are dead the clock does indeed reset to the beginning of time.
In all of our controllers the configuration and program settings in stored in eeprom. Power failures will not cause a loss of any of these settings. It could be that the tank pH is at a different value than normal because of the power failure.

Curt

[bowfront]

Thanks Curt,

I'm assuming the time was reset back to 00:00 because of what it was reading this morning but I'm not sure. The date definitely resets to Jan 01 1996 every time we loss power. Tonight I'll try unplugging and see exactly what happens. I'll contact you by email. Maybe the backup battery isn't working properly. So far everything else has worked great. For the money I think these little units are hard to beat. Keep up the good work.