Coralife 01692 Digital Power Center

They claim it to have 7 settings. Well it only runs on one 24 clock.. So either you have your daylight lights on or you nighttime lights.. You plus daylight plug into yellow and actinic/nightime into blue plus.. You set the timer for whatever time you want the white lights to run.. then the other nightime lights come on for the remainder of the time until its time for the whites to turn on again.

I bought this thinking i could program my daylights to come on at a certain time and then later in the day having my blue lights come on but nope.. doesnt work that way.. You can set it for different times of the week but thats it.. you cant have several times each day.. it was disappointing.. i finally got this answer from Coralife/Central who made this.

i'm returning my unit as i do not want a timer that runs 24 hours a day. dont make the mistake of buying this and thinking you can program different times. It runs 24/7 on one clock only.

This has an internal battery to keep the settings when the power goes out but that doesn't work too well so I plugged it into a battery back up and since then I have had no problems with it. I like this one better than the dial ones because there is no dial to hear clicking around.

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Setup of the unit is fairly easy. If you have set a digital clock then this should be a breeze. My only concern is after returning the first unit which I thought to be defective I discovered that you 1 should let the unit cycle without having your timed items plugged in to let the internal clock sync with the digital clock. Example if you purchased the unit and set it up in the evening before you wanted the lights off telling it to turn on at say 8:00am and off in the evening at say 8:00. The internal clock will still be turned off even though you told it to turn on during this time. The next day at 8:00am the unit will turn on the lights, and will operate normally.

My other problem with this unit is on both units if the main power switch is on when you plug in or unplug items, such as power heads or the like, the sudden pull will short the clock out and reset all of your settings and the time as well. So if you needed to unplug a power head filter for some reason you will need to turn off the main switch to do so. Otherwise you will loose all of your settings.

Other than these two complaints the unit works fairly well and for me at least is worth the hassle to have such a compact unit.

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I agree with an earlier post about the Battery Back-up being buggy. I bought one in late-Dec (it's now March 1) and it seems to just "lose" it's program for no apparent reason. The first time was while I was on vacation and all of my corals were left in the dark for several days (with one fatality). It's happened 2 or 3 times since then. We've not had any power-outages AND I've replaced the batteries in the unit just to play it safe. It still loses it's program arbitrarily. Kind of defeats the purpose of having an automatic light-timer!

I've emailed the manufacturer but no response :-(

Now I'm looking for a manual/dial-type of timer that (hopefully) I can rely on! I think I'll stay away from Coralife though.

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All-in-all a wonderful unit and easy to program. Two pairs of outlets connected to separate timers and four continuously powered outlets. I use one daytime plug for my metal halide bulb and the other for a circulation powerhead. The nighttime plugs are set up for my moonlight LEDs and another, lower-flow powerhead. You can use the remaining four outlets for normal maintenance equipment(i.e. chiller unit, heater, air pump, UV filter, etc).

The only negative aspect of this unit (as well as many others) is the plug spacing when using transformer plugs (LEDs). I would have gladly given up a bit of space in my cabinet for two timed outlets spaced farther apart.

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