Help - my skimmer went NUTS tonight.

[goldfish69]

Hi forum.

I'm about to leave for vacation in 3 days and my reef octopus 3000 went nuts tonight drainning out my entire 30g fresh water refill tank and some more.

Some of the water overflowed in my unfinished basement.

I'm also running a 200g system and hopefully with all that cold and fresh water coming into the tank, I hope that there won't be too much impact.

I also don't have any fresh water or salt water in hand and I panicked and plug my RO/DI unit to make some new water but smelled some burning after plugging the unit in so I quickly unplug it. The RO/DI unit is close to the sump got a bit wet when the skimmer overflowed - I just hope I didn't fry the unit. :mad2:

Right now, I turned off the skimmer and Gfo unit and running a fan to try to get everything dried up. Im hoping to be able to use the RO/DI unit in a few hours.

Im also thinking of leaving my skimmer off during my 7-day vacation because my cousin is coming to feed the fish and he wouldn't know what to do if the skimmer overflowed again.

Please provide any tips or advice for me.

Thanks

 

[DavidinGA]

I have a reef octopus and odds are your air intake nipple is/was clogged...

 

[Sk8r]

You can pretty safely leave anything but an sps reef unskimmed for 7 days. Fix your water problem, get things back in balance, and just expect to fix it when you get back.