I’m very satisfied with the Seneye for two things:
1.) True Ammonia (NH3) monitoring
2.) pH Monitoring
Added bonus is the light measurement function, but that’s one of those things I’ve used maybe 1 x a year, at most. Even less since the conversion to LEDs (from T-5’s).
In fact, I have 3 x Seneye sensors - One for my main system, and two Seneye’s for my baby clownfish fry rearing tanks & my quarantine tank management.
I’m openly critical about their business practices tho. Mostly, that decision of theirs too implement a “don’t report values” flag in the Version 2 firmware, which triggers at the end of 30 days to force one to buy / replace new slides. Since my quarantine process is usually 10 weeks long, I would stretch a slide out to 5-6 weeks of usage so I only needed 2x slides for an entire quarantined specimen (5 weeks x 2 = 10 weeks). There was never any guarantee that the slide would remain calibrated after 4 weeks, but I found it the stray from calibration was very slow and gradual. But when they forced the 30 day limit, that forced me to buy 3 slides for 10 weeks - that pissed me off. There was no value add in doing that to their customers, instead it was just to increase their revenue stream. In economic theory, we have a term for that: “Rent-seeking”. But in a commercial sense, I call it “punishing the loyal customer”. And typically, I tend to stay away from, and not recomend, companies that do this practice.
Further, I think they could have totally gobbled up a much larger market share if they’d just gone with an OpenSource approach and strategy from the very beginning. I’ve heard from many people their hesitation with buying one wasn’t the renewable cost of the slides, but the requirement to place a Windows based computer running 24/7 near their aquarium - OR - buying the 200+ euro Seneye Web Server.
My solution for the first few years was to run Seneye Connect Application on a Windows laptop / Virtual machine and plug my Seneye Sensors into RaspberryPi’s which ran VirtualHere clients on the Pi’s and a VirtualHere Server on the Windows computer as an USB over Ethernet bridge.
Years after their launch, they finally opened up a little bit. But it almost seems like a “compliance” action…perhaps from a Public Government owned Aquarium that was their customer and where regulation requiring the use of OpenSource software for government IT systems … like Germany… which might have forced this act (speculation on my part). But it was provided with no support and very little documentation, and didn’t work straight out of the box. I tried to make it work on my own, but failed and finally put it in the pile marked “requires way more time” to tackle one day.
Fortunately, @mcclown (bows in his direction, singing praises to him) solved all those usability problems for us, with his Seneye component for Home Assistant and now we have native support on RaspberryPi’s and we can use slides longer than the 30 days at our own risk. But from what I understand, he also banged his head on the keyboard for a long time to make it work.
Check eBay and Amazon for second hand units if you want to get one at a lower price. A lot of people leave the hobby and you can usually pick these up in fairly good shape at a cheaper price than the list price. Mine are about 5 years old and can attest to the build quality.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/adding-support-for-seneye-aquarium-pond-sensors-removing-the-need-for-a-seneye-web-server/