Well it has been a crazy 2 weeks or so at my house in the reefkeeping world. I woke up on sunday (the 28th) to find a pool of water surrounding my 220's stand, my first thought was a sump overflow or leaky bulkhead. I check under the stand to find water dripping from the underside of the tank, I check all the sides the top and the bulkheads and they are dry as a bone. At that point I come to the horrible conclusion that the tank is leaking from a bottom seam.
On the plus side I had placed my auto top off tank directly under my bulkheads in case they leaked it would fall back into the tank and that was the first part that saved my bacon. Oh yeah I forgot to mention I was running a 100 degree fever during this time and living off cold meds and tylenol. I get every bucket and tub in the house along with all the towels and proceed to drain about half the tank. Its during that process, that my wife (7 1/2 months pregnant) notices that one corner of the stand looks off, we check and sure enough the front right corner had given way but the extra reinforcments I had put in the stand had held, keeping this disaster to a slow leak instead of a rushing torrent.
Its about noon at that point and we are out of tubs, I run out to walmart to get 3 50 gallon rubbermaid tubs to hold the rock, corals and fish. I get the call halfway there that the stand is starting to creak, fastest shopping trip to walmart ever! I get the tubs home, we get everything out and into the tubs and the stand does not give way.
So at this point in time we have only lost a couple corals, no fish and the floor only got about 5 gallons of water on it. We had a new steel stand built so that it will never give way again and the tank is currently at LeeMar (they had built it) getting repaired (its coming back next thursday).
Sometimes paranoia pays off, when we got this tank secondhand I was not happy with the way the stand was built (4 plywood sides with the top and bottom tounge and grooved into place) so I cut 6 2x4's and placed one in each corner and 2 in the middle to act as extra support columns. When the top sheet of wood splipped out it only fell 1/4 of an inch and the extra 2x4 caught it.
Here are some pics
before reinforcing
after
So the end of the story for now is that everything is stable, this gives me a good opportunity to make some equipment changes that I wanted and our big 220 will be back up in action hopefully the end of next week!
On the plus side I had placed my auto top off tank directly under my bulkheads in case they leaked it would fall back into the tank and that was the first part that saved my bacon. Oh yeah I forgot to mention I was running a 100 degree fever during this time and living off cold meds and tylenol. I get every bucket and tub in the house along with all the towels and proceed to drain about half the tank. Its during that process, that my wife (7 1/2 months pregnant) notices that one corner of the stand looks off, we check and sure enough the front right corner had given way but the extra reinforcments I had put in the stand had held, keeping this disaster to a slow leak instead of a rushing torrent.
Its about noon at that point and we are out of tubs, I run out to walmart to get 3 50 gallon rubbermaid tubs to hold the rock, corals and fish. I get the call halfway there that the stand is starting to creak, fastest shopping trip to walmart ever! I get the tubs home, we get everything out and into the tubs and the stand does not give way.
So at this point in time we have only lost a couple corals, no fish and the floor only got about 5 gallons of water on it. We had a new steel stand built so that it will never give way again and the tank is currently at LeeMar (they had built it) getting repaired (its coming back next thursday).
Sometimes paranoia pays off, when we got this tank secondhand I was not happy with the way the stand was built (4 plywood sides with the top and bottom tounge and grooved into place) so I cut 6 2x4's and placed one in each corner and 2 in the middle to act as extra support columns. When the top sheet of wood splipped out it only fell 1/4 of an inch and the extra 2x4 caught it.
Here are some pics
before reinforcing
after
So the end of the story for now is that everything is stable, this gives me a good opportunity to make some equipment changes that I wanted and our big 220 will be back up in action hopefully the end of next week!
