I leave my system completely alone for weeks at a time, its regular thing with my extensive travel schedule, school schedule, and small children.
I havent lost sleep over tank mishaps in years
-Tunze osmolator, 35g top off container on floor, feed line ran high and above water level to prevent any syphoning or gravity dosing.
-CO2 reactor set up so that even if the solenoid failed, the ph in the reactor would take days to even begin to drop to dangerous levels, although it could happen I guess
-closed loop in main tank keeps circulation in DT if main pump in basement fails
-very tall, well ventilated canopy prevents heat issues from halides if main pump not working.
-100g sump full of about 150lbs of live rock also doubles as a fuge. between skimmers, powerheads for carbon/GFO reactors, there is also plenty of circulation.
-skimmer of course drains to a 5g bucket
-because the bulk of my system is in the basement, I have never had to worry about heat
-double drain lines in the overflow, should one clog, the other will pick it up.
-ranco temp controller
-with a 100g fuge, I can(and have) go weeks without feeding the system. I dont recommend it, but there is plenty of live critters and stuff to feed on.
I have designed almost everything in my system from a lesson learned from some type of mishap over the years. I also purposefully do not use a main controller like a Reef Keeper or anything for a couple of reasons.
1) I do not like the single point of failure aspect of a single controller, the cool factor of the controller is very tempting, but I am a technician by trade, and all components will fail eventually.
2) I prefer to make much more simple, yet robust and isolated failsafes for the components of the system. Each operation is completely seperate from another. I have it set up for things like the main pump does not share any circuit with anything else for the tank. All other pumps and powerheads are on seperate circuits. Basically, I have 3 seperate 120v circuits for just circulation between upstairs and downstairs. The only way for everything to lose power is whole house outage. ( I have a generator, but its a manual hookup)
3) Should an emergency occur, it is much easier to call someone(usually my wife) and tell her to unplug, or reset 1 individual component or plug, instead of trying to talk her through troubleshooting a RK over the phone.
