Hello, fellow reefers! I just suffered my second disaster this year and I'm just thoroughly discouraged...
My tank was started by my father in 1989 and has been in my care since 2004. I kept it in my studio apartment in NYC and flew it by hand to San Francisco when I moved here in 2008...
I moved apartments this past February, and had my first disaster. I broke down the tank and by the time everything was ready to go back into the tank, the buckets of water had dropped to ~63F. Not a big deal. I dropped a heater into the tank and finally got to bed around 3am. The next morning, the thermometer still read 64F, so I threw more heat at it. All day long, the temp reading never reached above 64F so I kept throwing more heat at it. By about 6pm, I had close to 2,000W of heat in the water and the tank was so cloudy you couldn't see through it. I finally grabbed my meat thermometer and the tank read 98F!! It was at this point I realized the sensor that reads the temp wasn't in the water. Total facepalm. 100% user error... Long story short, everything died, all the fish and most of the coral.
Flash forward to November, everything rebounded hand the tank looked great. A bit of hair algae growing in a hard to reach spot, but nothing alarming. I flew to NYC for 12 days over Thanksgiving and by my calculations within 2 hours of leaving the house, we had a power outage that tripped my GFCI and when the power came back on, guess what didn't come back on? For 12 days...
All my fish are gone. All my corals are gone. Even the large finger leathers have turned to skeleton. The hair algae that was minor is now running wild....
What should I do? Rebuild? Sell it? Donate it to a children's hospital?
It is a 120 Glasscages tank, with their stand/canopy (42" tall) and a 60 gallon sump tank with a Bubble Magus skimmer. Apex system running the show...
#lesigh
My tank was started by my father in 1989 and has been in my care since 2004. I kept it in my studio apartment in NYC and flew it by hand to San Francisco when I moved here in 2008...
I moved apartments this past February, and had my first disaster. I broke down the tank and by the time everything was ready to go back into the tank, the buckets of water had dropped to ~63F. Not a big deal. I dropped a heater into the tank and finally got to bed around 3am. The next morning, the thermometer still read 64F, so I threw more heat at it. All day long, the temp reading never reached above 64F so I kept throwing more heat at it. By about 6pm, I had close to 2,000W of heat in the water and the tank was so cloudy you couldn't see through it. I finally grabbed my meat thermometer and the tank read 98F!! It was at this point I realized the sensor that reads the temp wasn't in the water. Total facepalm. 100% user error... Long story short, everything died, all the fish and most of the coral.
Flash forward to November, everything rebounded hand the tank looked great. A bit of hair algae growing in a hard to reach spot, but nothing alarming. I flew to NYC for 12 days over Thanksgiving and by my calculations within 2 hours of leaving the house, we had a power outage that tripped my GFCI and when the power came back on, guess what didn't come back on? For 12 days...
All my fish are gone. All my corals are gone. Even the large finger leathers have turned to skeleton. The hair algae that was minor is now running wild....
What should I do? Rebuild? Sell it? Donate it to a children's hospital?
It is a 120 Glasscages tank, with their stand/canopy (42" tall) and a 60 gallon sump tank with a Bubble Magus skimmer. Apex system running the show...
#lesigh