Thank you to everyone here who offered to help. I just removed my Fiji Yellow Leather last night. What a shame. It finally turned a corner the last couple nights and was not salvageable- it had to be removed.
I'm very sorry about all your losses. I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind describing what measures you took during the outage to minimize loss?
You know there wasn't much I could do. I was arrogant enough to think the power would be on sooner than it was. The bottom line is I have an 8 foot, shallow open top tank that is 1" acrylic. From what I've experienced with past outages, the tank stays fairly insulated.
Unfortunately, the weather after Irene was on the cool side. The fish died off rapidly. I removed them instantly, but it did not help.
Like I've said before, one of my mistakes was trying to save stuff that was rapidly dying off and fouling the tank. I considered moving the 40 Breeder I have to someone's house and relocating, but I felt like I had hit "the point of no return." I felt it was just as dangerous to move things as to leave them.
I stopped dosing as I could not control anything. Water changes were 100% out of the question without aeration and temp control- the water going in would have been 10 degrees cooler than the already falling tank temp.
I drove to the LFS to look for battery powered pumps...closed for days. I went looking for generators...gone. I went and looked at generators off the back of trucks...$1800. $2400. ouch. People were putting them on Craigs list for 3-4 times what they were worth.
What really did me in was I had the opportunity to hook into my neighbors generator. It was a 68 year old beast his father had installed years ago...I believe it came from an old Steam factory. The problem is it went the first night, so the portable one he had to replace it was no sufficient- ie I thought I had "an out" in place day one.
I considered ordering a generator online and just waiting, and I had a friend of the family offer to lend a generator from his sign shop...before I could pick it up, the power came back on.
