Well, I must say it has been a very bad couple of weeks for me with the aquarium.
Pretty much everything has gone wrong, all in a short span.
1) The first problem was my GFCI was tripping every couple of days.
Which of course, turns a lot of equipment off.
But at every few days, super hard to debug.
- Faulty power strip.
SO: I decided to completely re-wire the AC section.
Instead of the normal single GFCI -> string of outlets, I now have 8 independent GFCI outlets.
So same protection, but if one trips, only that one stops, not the whole system.
A fair bit of work, and expensive, but I feel better about it.
2) Unstable Alk/Calcium, causing PH swings.
My old dosers were simply not up to the task of the large tank. Too slow.
So I got some new higher speed dosers.
Takes time to dial in the timing.
Unfortunately, the standard programming on the reef controller was to coarse, so had to change that.
Combine all that mucking around with the power going out ....
Ugly.
But now I have dosers up to run every hour, with half our offset between them, with the interval programmed in seconds.
3) Two power heads stopped working.
Full of crud, and stopped during one of the power outages.
But they were in the back, and with so many other issue, I really did not notice for a while.
Not a big deal, but annoying.
4) Pulled a comm wire out of the second micro controller.
Not sure how. Probably with all the new electrical.
But the results - lights were on full (which is above normal), for some 40 hours nonstop.
Fortunately, only issue is slight bleaching at the tips of my colt coral.
5) Main sump return pump stopped working.
It was still on. Just doing nothing. Likely crud in the impeller.
Power cycled and works. But I think I will add a better pre-filter.
It was pretty much off all night.
Heaters are all in the sump, so main tank cooled a fair bit.
6) The ICH is back with a vengeance.
No sign of it for almost 3 months, but now it is back.
No real surprise. The above mishaps I am sure caused a lot of stress on the fish.
This is now the real big issue.
Despite all that, I feel really lucky.
I have a big vacation planned. Most of the above is now fixed.
If even one of those had failed during the vacation, I could have returned to a totally dead tank.
arty:
