Multiple profilux controllers

[john7103]

Could some one please explain to me why one would have the need for more than one profilux controller please and is there any advantage in using more than one seemingly you can't connect them to each other so WHY

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[Vinny]

If a user wants to expand their current Profilux, we recommend that an Expansion Box 2 be purchased rather than a whole new controller.

[CaptCrash]

In regards to your question of multiple controllers, heres an example for you.

In my case, I started with a single controller. This grew over time and now hahad 3 x expansion boxes, 2 x Touch, 7 x PAB PowerBars, lots of L channels for lighting and lots of level sensors.
Some of the equipment was inside on a single tank, other equipment is outside with my breeding setup (four seperate racks of tanks).

The complexity gave rise to a couple of risks
1. With the breeding setup, there is often a need to make configuration changes, be it temp, lighting periods etc. Occasionally this would mean I made some errors when changing settings. It also takes longer to open and operate the App, GCC etc
2. More controllers means more feeding pause options, maintenance options (with multiple systems, this is a real limitation of the GHL approach)
3. As the size of the environment increased, a failure of the controller or power supply to controller would cause more disruption (I had 2 power supply failures in 3 months).
4. Upgrades were an all day affair with so many devices in the infrastructure.

Initially I chose to seperate the system into two with outside and inside, both sharing the same PAB bus.
This worked ok, but didn't allow for remote management (iPhone App or internal Web Site) for both controllers.
It did allow me to control both controllers via GCC connection to one controller

Now I have the two systems completely seperate, this works well and I am much happier with it.

Each can be controlled and if I was to have a failure of a controller, I could with some reconfiguration manage the entire configuration from a single controller as a temporary workaround.

As to the part of the question of using a common PAB network, it seems a bit like a pointless feature in its current implementation.
The only reasons I can see to use a common PAB network is to

1. Save some cabling
2. Allow devices that would otherwise be more than 100m apart to communicate
3. Manage multiple controllers via a singe USB/RS232 connection

eg. Controller 1 -> 90m cable -> Controller 2 -> 90m cable -> PAB Bar 2 -> 90m cable -> PAB Bar 1
In this example Controller 1 can communicate with PAB Bar 1 over 270m, this is much further than the 100m limit per cable.

If GHL were to improve on the capabilities of this feature, for example allowing the SMS unit to connect to multiple PAB controllers, then this would be a great use and would provide a point for having multiple controllers on the same PAB network. Unfortunately this does not look like something that GHL are either willing or able to do.

[Gael]

+1 for allowing the SMS unit to connect to multiple profilux, good exemple of device to share. For the moment i have only one SMS-PAB on my reef tank, i don't want to buy again a sms unit and pay another mobile phone subscription for my freshwater aquarium.