Tank died

[bprewit]

Well just returned from Argentina and electicity at my house was shut off. Close to 4 years running and my 55g reef is dead. All I can say is "****". I messed with that tank every day for the last 4 years and it was my pride and joy, now everything is lost. The only thing that survived was my sump/fuge which luckily had about 25lbs of rock, couple inches of sand full on critters, and some shrooms. I restarted the main tank adding the sand and rock from sump/fuge and hopefully wont have a 6 week cycle. I left the thing running for a week or so and checked all levels and added a fish, so far so good. I am going with fish only this time, atleast for now maybe someday get another tank (much bigger) and try reef again. Sucks when everything was going along so perfectly, parameters were rock stable and very predictable, poof all over. **** **** **** ****. 400W of metal halide is a bit overkill for tank full of fish eh?

[scuba_steveo]

Sorry to hear that man.

[SuperXdude]

Sue the power company?

[Reef69]

Sue the power company?

Thats impossible, .. IMO, you should have had a friend or someone check on your tank, thats what i do when i have to go away for a cpl of days..i also make sure the electricity bill is paid, it sucks man, specially since it was your pride and joy..

[bprewit]

Not possible to sue the electric company, though I wouldnt mind ****ing in their coffee pot someday. The crappy thing is that the bill was paid, on time just like always. They made a mistake and cut my power, apologized and then turned it back on but 5 days later. I trained my gf that lives here how to take care of the aquarium but had never planned for a long term power outage like what happened. This week I built a wooden enclosure with a couple of large 12v car batteries and a 1500 watt inverter that should run a powerhead or two and a heater for quite awhile. Even better would be to add a recycle timer to the power backup that ran the pump/pumps on a cycle of 5 minutes on/5 minutes off to conserve power and still keep the tank water moving. I just need to test exactly how long the system will run off the batteries when fully charged. Sucks to learn from mistakes but I guarantee I wont be caught with my pants down again!

[jenreadsalot]

So sorry.

[dan]

hate to here any thing like that!!!!!!!!!!! sorry man

[GaryP]

I talked to a customer of mine about building a solar power/battery system as a power back-up. This would be similar to what is used on gate openers on a lot of the ranchs around here.

Gary