Last night's fiasco

[aagresti]

I did a 5 gal water change last night around midnight. At 3am our smoke alarms go off (total of 8 throughout the house all blaring), so I tell my wife to make sure the kids are up and I go running around the house to find the problem. To my surprise and relief, no fire / no smoke, but there's water leaking through the basement ceiling. [profanity], the water must be coming from the fish tank. I go running upstairs and there's water all over the family room floor, the return section of my sump has no water and the pump is running dry. upon inspection I see the the carbon chamber had tilted. it's old school clear acrylic tube where water enters through the bottom and spills over the top. well after it tilted, the top of the chamber was over the lip of my sump and the water spilled out. Finally an hour later after mixing another 5 gal of water and drying all the floors with rags I got back to bed. sometimes i hate this hobby. luckily no losses or real damage just a water stained ceiling.

the scariest thing out of all this, my wife said that neither of my children heard the smoke alarms in their rooms and were sound asleep when she entered their rooms. I've heard of sleeping soundly but that's frightening.

 

[cullyisgully]

Glad to see that all is well and not a big lost.. I know what you mean with the water chang.

 

[Turbovr3six]

Glad to hear it was nothing major with the tank, and more importantly your family and house. But if you look on the bright side, you know your alarms work. Maybe for the future invest into some water alarms. This way you can catch it earlier.

 

[jarrett shark]

Thank god all Ok, now get some sleep.
So the alarms also do flood???
Thats why you should never cheap out or use some old stuff becasue it will catch up to you later,lol

 

[DrHarryLopez]

Glad to hear everyone is safe n sound.

I have horns for alarms! If they go off I think you'll be able to hear them in NJ from bklyn! This if a a perfect time to have a fire drill with your children.

Whenever you have hoses or any type of water device coming out of an enclosure you should have no doubt that it can ever give and spill water.

Also if power should go out, ALL the water should be able to stay inside in the system whereas the sump level would just rise up.

Many many other fail safe tips out there which we should compile, demonstrate, and present to the club.

 

[guarda]

I would definitely check into those low freq. alarms for your kids' rooms if they couldn't hear the normal one. They're lucky, I wake up if my vortech in the other room gets misaligned!

 

[poolkeeper1]

I think the Apex has an app for a water sensor that will tell you there is a problem right away so you can Nip It In the Bud!
Bill

 

[bertoni]

Please don't use creative spellings to get around the profanity filter.

 

[jarrett shark]

I think the Apex has an app for a water sensor that will tell you there is a problem right away so you can Nip It In the Bud!
Bill

i think i want this for the apex just to be safe

 

[aagresti]

please don't use creative spellings to get around the profanity filter.

ok

 

[aagresti]

thanks to all for the suggestions and kind words. I'll have to figure out something so kids hear the fire alarm. As far as the water, normally if power goes out, the water just drains to my sump which has sufficient volume but in this case the reaction chamber tilted. I guess i need an alarm for a low water level.

 

[anthony27]

I must say from reading so much, I know that when you do Maintance to the tank after midnight something (not all the time) goes wrong :/

 

[anthony27]

When I hade a 45 bow front, I did a water change at 1 in the morning on a friday night. I had a marine tide pool at the time so this is going back a few years, but when cleaning the tank I knocked over the return (tank was not plummed) and the water went on the surge. I shocked my self and to this day I still think that is the reason why I have no hair.

 

[DrHarryLopez]

Ck out this water sensor Aldo. Pls let me know what you think

Water Sensor for Apex

 

[anthony27]

I heard they are supposed to be really good