Collinrb
New member
It's not THAT hard to keep your tank going through a muli-day power loss. Your can cut back on everything but heat and water flow. No lights, skimmers, etc. Don't feed anything. And set your water temp to 70 degrees (or less). And if it's cold, wrap your tank in newspapers and/or blankets.
Supplying power to a limited function tank (as described above) is not as hard as you might think. What I'm about to suggest MIGHT toast some pumps because it does not supply pure sine-wave current. But it works just fine for my Eheim pumps and Vortechs...
Get yourself an "inverter". They'll have them at Sears and automotive parts stores and will cost way less than $100. They can be hooked up to the battery in your car, or to a stand-alone car battery. The inverter will have AC sockets on it that you can plug your tank into. If you hook an inverter up to your car battery, you have to leave the car running continuously and have a REALLY long, properly rated, extension cord. And if are using stand alone car batteries, you'll need to know how many Kilowatt hours the battery holds. And technically you should not have a car battery indoors because of the noxious fumes they can release. So you'll need an extension cord for that too.
Inverters are measured in the number of watts they can supply, so you'll need to know how many watts you need. Just add up the total wattage of all the stuff you'll be providing power to. If some of the equipment only provides an amperage (amps) rating and not watts, just multiply the amps required by number of the volts it runs on (usually 120) and you'll have the wattage.
So to put it all together, I got some big marine batteries (like car batteries but bigger) that deliver 0.7 kilowatt hours. That means it'll supply 700 watts for an hour. Or 1,400 for 30 minutes. Or 70 watts for 10 hours. Making sense? Hope so. Let's keep going...
And the equipment I want to keep going is a heater (100 watts) and one Vortech MP10 (8 to 18 watts, depending on speed). My Eheim 1260 return pump is 65 watts. So to minimize watts needed I'll turn off my return pump, move the heater out of the sump and into the tank, and set my MP10 to its slowest speed. Maybe also move the MP10 nearer the surface to maximize gas exchange. Then I'll turn off ALL the other equipment, set my heater to 70, and wrap the tank with newspaper. That is a total of 8 watts when the heater is not on, 108 watts when it is.
That means that I needed to buy an inverter that is rated for at least 108 watts (they all are). And when I hooked that up to the 0.7 kwatt marine battery, I can run the tank for roughly 87 hours if the heater never has to turn on. I calculated that by dividing 700 watt hours (the battery) by 8 watts (the MP10). If the heat is on all the time that number goes down to 6.5 hours (700 divided by 108). So reality will be between those two numbers, depending on how often - and how long - the heater comes one.
Granted - this was just for a little 33g tank. But the solution scales. Just do the math. Hope that helps.
Don't know how many of you check over on the ARKSC forum, but Scolley posted this over there, and I thought it'd be useful for some other people as well.
Also True Value in Killingworth still has generators, and plenty of them as of today is anyone is in a real pinch
P.S. wish i has put as the title. So you wont have a generator and still want your tank to survive
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