steveweast
Active member
Well....I had a little incident Thursday morning......
Thursday morning, I did a water change and decided to clean the powerheads on my skimmer since I haven't cleaned those in over a year. I got everything up and going, when I got a call that forced me to leave earlier than I had planned.
I returned home around 10pm......meaning that I was gone some 14 hrs. Well, apparently, clean skimmer pumps are much more efficient than dirty ones......so, the skimmer proceeded to overflow and empty my entire 200 gal sump down the drain. I had to do something....and since I had no water made up and it would take two days to generate 200 gals....I was forced to use tap water. Our water up here is actually not too bad out of the tap.
I also had some dechlorinator on hand that I've had...but never needed....for years. I filled the sump, mixed in dechlorinator, salt.....mixed well.....and powered up. Everything was back on line....went to bed.
I woke up Friday to the tank of death....every single sps coral is gone. All ricordea....gone. Fish and lps are fine....anemones...not happy; but alive. I removed all the dead stuff.....some seven buckets of sps heads ....some two feet in diameter.....very sad.
I feel that the fault was mine....I probably would have been fine with just taking the two days to create more water.....after all, my closed loop was working fine and I could have always added aeration. The second mistake was probably adding too much of a very old dechlorinator....which, I feel, was the primary cause of death. It was just a case of reacting too quickly and not thinking.
I always try to find the bright side in the face of adversity....in this case:
1) I'm going to save a ton on reactor media.
2) My cold tank is doing great....I can always look at that instead
3) no more AEFW's
4) no more red bugs
5) I guess I can reaquascape now
6) I'm now a buyer for sps heads
7) I have a vacation coming up and I won't have to worry a lick about the tank.
And to think that I was contemplating updating my site with new pics......well, at least that saves some time taking new pics.....starting over sucks.....
Thursday morning, I did a water change and decided to clean the powerheads on my skimmer since I haven't cleaned those in over a year. I got everything up and going, when I got a call that forced me to leave earlier than I had planned.
I returned home around 10pm......meaning that I was gone some 14 hrs. Well, apparently, clean skimmer pumps are much more efficient than dirty ones......so, the skimmer proceeded to overflow and empty my entire 200 gal sump down the drain. I had to do something....and since I had no water made up and it would take two days to generate 200 gals....I was forced to use tap water. Our water up here is actually not too bad out of the tap.
I also had some dechlorinator on hand that I've had...but never needed....for years. I filled the sump, mixed in dechlorinator, salt.....mixed well.....and powered up. Everything was back on line....went to bed.
I woke up Friday to the tank of death....every single sps coral is gone. All ricordea....gone. Fish and lps are fine....anemones...not happy; but alive. I removed all the dead stuff.....some seven buckets of sps heads ....some two feet in diameter.....very sad.
I feel that the fault was mine....I probably would have been fine with just taking the two days to create more water.....after all, my closed loop was working fine and I could have always added aeration. The second mistake was probably adding too much of a very old dechlorinator....which, I feel, was the primary cause of death. It was just a case of reacting too quickly and not thinking.
I always try to find the bright side in the face of adversity....in this case:
1) I'm going to save a ton on reactor media.
2) My cold tank is doing great....I can always look at that instead
3) no more AEFW's
4) no more red bugs
5) I guess I can reaquascape now
6) I'm now a buyer for sps heads
7) I have a vacation coming up and I won't have to worry a lick about the tank.
And to think that I was contemplating updating my site with new pics......well, at least that saves some time taking new pics.....starting over sucks.....
