You always hear the stories. “We left on vacation and…” insert your own nightmare here. I have heard things like:
Won’t happen to me. I have backups and fail safes. I have redundancy in just about every aspect of my system. And, I have the ReefKeeper Elite. If something goes wrong, it will let me know and I can direct someone to fix it.
And so, without a care in the world I left for a 5 day vacation to Disney. And it was a great trip, except for the heat!
And, less than 24 hours in, I start getting warnings on my Droid about severe thunderstorms at home. Over and over. And then I get a phone call.
Power is out at home.
No big deal. I have 2 Vortechs, each with their own battery back up and I run the tank cool int he summer months just in case (78.0), so the tank will be fine for at least 8 hours. If we ever lose power its for an hour, no more.
8 hours later, still no power. No AC, tank is heating up. Frag tank is stagnant. No water moevement. No oxygenation. I am starting to worry.
New reports come in from home. Power to be out until Monday. That’s 5 DAYS!!!!
DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!!!
So, from the Magical World of Disney, I go into panic mode. My tank will certainly die by then. Everything will be a total loss, including the frag tank FULL of a fellow reefer’s corals.
Luckily, there is a reefer in my neighborhood and my neighbor is an electrician. So what? Well, he has a whole house generator.
So, my neighbor ran a 150ft extension cord from one house to my basement. And voila!, my main pump is running!
That was enough. Because my frag tank, refugium, and sump (total water volume = 180g) are in the basement, it cools the water to my display tank enough. It gets circulation and oxygenation to everything!
And I can rest easy.
Power was restored on Saturday evening, a little over 48 hours later.
We arrived home on Sunday at 11:59pm. All was well!
I experienced not one loss!!!!
Thank god for friends!
Posted On: Saturday, June 26th, 2010
Posted In: Reef Blog
Subscribe: RSS 2.0
Comments: 7 Responses
Whoah! Crazy story.
I know. I was really concerned and went back and forth in my mind between, “its all gonna die” to “I can save this”. In the end, though, all is well.
Wow! You must’ve been stressing BIG TIME. Luckily your reefing bud had a generator. I think the majority of folks would be SOL. Not sure my landlord would let me park a generator outside my apartment! Thank you for sharing your story. Would be interesting to hear about each of the fail safes you have in place in a future post (as far as what products you’re running, etc.).
Great idea!
I had an equipment list at one time. I think its time to re-do it.
U are a luck man with good neighbours!
Wow, crisis averted indeed. I remember how stress out I was when I went on my honeymoon.
The bad thing is, you can never be prepared for absolutely everything. And power outages are the worst. Fortunately, you had good neighbors that were willing to help.
I know what you mean. We just got our tank 2 months ago, and I’ve been afraid to leave for longer than a weekend ever since.