recoiljpr
Thu, 6th Aug 2009, 12:02 PM
Last night I was doing final tweaks to my rock work on the new tank. My 7 year old loves to help me with the tank, so I had him cleaning the fuge. While arm deep in the tank and balancing on a stool the 7 year old yells "Dad, I just broke something, the water isn't coming down from the tank". My first thought was my wife is going to kill me for giving a 7 year old a razor blade. My next thought was since I didn't hear a blood curdling scream, he probably didn't cut himself.
I look down and sure enough, the overflow is dry, yet I notice the level in the sump instead of being high, is going lower. I look up into the tank and I see the return pump is still running, and the display tanks levels are getting higher. I quickly turn off the return pump (Bless you American DJ power center!!!!). I go and look at my standpipe and it looks normal. I squat down and I then notice my ginormous turbo snail decided he wanted to go into the overflow. Being he is much bigger then the 1 3/4" pipe, he plugged it!. Since I purposely did not cap the ends, I was able to free him. Being that I did not want him to do that again, I placed him in my fuge. I figured he had enough algae in there to keep him full.
Later that night, while looking through the tank with a flashlight with my boys, I noticed that my return flow was really slow. I opened up the stand and go look at my return pump (Mag 5). Sure enough, the dreaded Turbo snail from hell was sitting right next to the return pump happily chomping away on algae. His ginormous shell was right up on the intake, and got sucked in there by the suction. I turned off the pump and freed the #$@!* snail and put him back into the fuge. In order to get to the pump he had to climb over the acrylic and get down into the pump. I still don't know HOW he did it.
I learned this time though. I got some left over egg crate, and using zip ties I made a cage for the pump.
My only wonder now is, what havoc is he going to cause next?
I look down and sure enough, the overflow is dry, yet I notice the level in the sump instead of being high, is going lower. I look up into the tank and I see the return pump is still running, and the display tanks levels are getting higher. I quickly turn off the return pump (Bless you American DJ power center!!!!). I go and look at my standpipe and it looks normal. I squat down and I then notice my ginormous turbo snail decided he wanted to go into the overflow. Being he is much bigger then the 1 3/4" pipe, he plugged it!. Since I purposely did not cap the ends, I was able to free him. Being that I did not want him to do that again, I placed him in my fuge. I figured he had enough algae in there to keep him full.
Later that night, while looking through the tank with a flashlight with my boys, I noticed that my return flow was really slow. I opened up the stand and go look at my return pump (Mag 5). Sure enough, the dreaded Turbo snail from hell was sitting right next to the return pump happily chomping away on algae. His ginormous shell was right up on the intake, and got sucked in there by the suction. I turned off the pump and freed the #$@!* snail and put him back into the fuge. In order to get to the pump he had to climb over the acrylic and get down into the pump. I still don't know HOW he did it.
I learned this time though. I got some left over egg crate, and using zip ties I made a cage for the pump.
My only wonder now is, what havoc is he going to cause next?