Programming Help to determine if primary heater died

[Jeff_H]

All,

I would like to setup an alert to notify me if my 'primary' heater fails in the off position, and I think I ran into a snag with how the Apex monitors outlets/outputs in the manual or auto positions.

Details: I have two heaters running my tank which are controlled via the Apex temperature probe. The primary heater is set at the on/off temperatures I want the tank to remain at, and the secondary/failover heater is set about 1 degree below the primary and acts as a fail-over/backup for the primary, plus in the event the room gets really cold, will help maintain the desired temperature.

I was attempting to setup a virtual outlet/output to monitor the power (watts) and have it turn on if the primary heater doesn't turn on within a set period of time. The programming I thought would work is below.

Set OFF
If Output Heater_1_6 Watts < 20 Then ON
Defer 900:00 Then ON

I set the virtual outlet/output to auto, but it never came on. After reading through the Advanced Control Freak Guide I found the following statement.

Important Note: As the Apex evaluates and executes programming, these new alarm options and programming statements will be ignored if the specified output is manually OFF or the output is in AUTO and the output state is OFF due to programming. This behavior prevents false alarms about low watts or amps when an EB832 output is OFF.

I believe this is the reason why I can never get the virtual outlet/output to turn on. My heaters need to be set to auto to work properly, which will cause the Apex to ignore my program I created.

Does anyone know of a way to 'exclude' the ignore option in a case like this for an outlet? Or is there a better way to monitor the health of a heater and alert if it dies in the off position?

Thanks in advance for your help?


Jeff

[RussM]

The issue is that you have told the VO not to turn ON until the heater output has continuously been ON for 15 hours and the watts reading has continuously been < 20 for that 15 hours. Use a much more realistic value for the Defer. If the Apex turns on an EB832 outlet for a heater, and that heater has failed and is drawing no current, you can see that almost instantly; use a Defer of 20-30 seconds.

[Jeff_H]

Russ,

Thanks for the reply.

You are correct. After reviewing the power log, heater 1 will shut off for up to 12 hours during the day so I added the 15 hours defer to prevent a false positive. Are you saying the event will 'only' trigger if the heater goes to the 'on' position and there is no draw? If so, I would need to unplug the heater to test it, correct?

[zombie]

The watts values are automatically false when the heater is OFF. You need the defer to be short like 10-30 seconds.

You might be an engineer if...You have no life and can prove it mathematically.

[Jeff_H]

I originally had the value set to 5 seconds to test, but never saw it come on. I'm assuming now this is due to what Russ and Zombie explained about the condition only triggering once the switch turned to on and the condition was met. Since I had a good heater plugged, in it would not trip the alert. I just tested the code again on an outlet with nothing plugged in with a 20 second defer and it worked perfect.

Thank you both for your feedback and assistance!

[Jeff_H]

I spoke too soon. I tested the code on an outlet that had nothing plugged in and it worked fine, per my last post. After that, I setup the code and alert on primary heater and life was good until last night when the heater turned on and I started to receive a constant stream of on and off states. I checked the power state of the heater and it was on so I turned off my VO and called it a night. This morning I looked into it again and I guess I don't know enough about the power programming and how the numbers are represented.

What am I missing here?

Set OFF
If Output Heater_1_6 Watts < 20 Then ON
Defer 000:20 Then ON


Here are a couple of screenshots of the email alerts and power state according to the apex.

power.pngemail.png

[zombie]

Is the internal heater thermostat set high enough? It could be a legit alarm saying that the heaters thermostat shut it off even though it's got power from the EB.

You might be an engineer if...You have no life and can prove it mathematically.

[Jeff_H]

Bingo! @zombie - My knee-jerk reaction was going to be to say 'no' since I know I have the heater thermostat set well above my Apex temperature (86 degrees vs. 78) and I was watching the Fusion interface on the outlet to make sure it was drawing amps. Turns out I wasn't watching Fusion long enough to see the problem and the graphs in the power log must be averaged since they don't report the dip in power.

After watching the readout on the Finnex HMO w/Digital Controller it's obvious what's going on now. Reviews I just read on this heater suggest it has a poor design in that the temperature is estimated from within the heater body and there are many people reporting the same issue of needing to raise the heater temperature many degrees above the actual water temperature. I raised the heater temperature to 87 degrees, but it's still doing it, just not as quickly. I have a Jager in reserve that I might install on the primary to resolve this issue.

Thanks again for the help!