One would expect things to always go as planned especially when the whole swap was made to just be on the safe side or at least that's what I thought.
Same day I left to Dubai at 2:00 Am I receive a call from my wife. Alarming as it is at that time, something inside told me it was about the tank. While picking up the phone I notice an Apex automatic leak detection alarm as well.
Picked up the phone and had that confirmed. My immediate concern was to have wife shut down tank electricity. then to know if this was a whole tank failure or just a leak. as wife had told me teh water was all over the house in 2 living rooms, kitchen and 3 bedrooms which was scary as I had a drain besides the tank. so i was fearing a total pannel failure.
I get the first picture from my wife and to some relief front panel is still there but tank is leaking severely from top to middle of left front seam. water was like a Jet.
I shut down the basement return pump by Apex (as it has a power supply independent from the house) to avoid more water being supplied to the tank.
at that moment I realized that I'm risking a complete loss as my wife is definitely not able to handle this.
I make a call to the LFS owner who built my new tank at 2:05 AM and to my relief he answers and instinctively knows my tank has failed. in 20 min he's at my place with an assistant, I still dont' believe how. I wake up the building concierge as well who goes to my basement in the mean time and prepares buckets and hoses...
He starts by putting thick scotch tape on the front glass and pressing it on the side glass (as he didn't have clamps since he was at home) and this stops the leak, At this stage water was at 3/4 of the tank so the intensity of the leak had reduced. they run the hose from home to basement and syphon the water to the tank I had previously prepared months back. they catch all the fish and move the rocks with the corals down. couple big rocks didn't fit in the holding tank so they break off corals on them and lace the corals in the tank. they also connected a return pump from the sump to the holding tank. Another issue we realized is that the ATO container had been all pumped into the system (around 120 Litres 35 G) luckily the salinity was still at 1.025 so we didn't even add salt.
I book the first available flight home and arrive the same day at midnight. During the 4 hours flight i was mentally prepared for the first time to take down my tank and kept thinking it could have been worse with the electricity being close...
Arrive home and my wifes first words are, its good that you have the new tank ready so it should be easy to get it going again right?!!!
I just couldn't believe my ears after all she had been through.
Check the tank and I come back to this.
To think that this
was reduced to this
in only 4 hours , was simply heartbreaking.
chekcked the fish and corals in the basement and luckily everything looked fine except for couple of fish that were stuck in the rocks that didn't fit in the holding tank which I found dead between the rocks (flasher wrass and a fridmani) this was sad but an acceptable loss so far.
i quickly added 3 LED lights I had over that tank (2 orpheks and 1 razor) and set them at low intensity as my corals are mostly used to halides and minimal LED.
