The trials of reefing

[jelwyoming]

A while I had posted a thread about the many trials that I'd experienced as a reefer. Now, to add to my saga;
Last December, we went through a burglery where the guy left our front door open in subzero temperatures....that froze my 5 year old 120g reef. I lost 5k of livestock to that.
Now, I have just begun to recover from that, putting in a mated flame angel pair and a mated pair of flame hawkfish; two of my very favorite and hard to find pairs. Well, this week we had a heck of a blizzard. I was trapped at work, the house lost power for 50 hours and the back up UPS only lasted 24 hours. I have a generator just for that, but the family could not get it going. In the end when I returned home last night, I'd lost both of those pairs. Fortunately, the clowns and anthias made it.
If you are going to reef, you are going to suffer losses....

 

[wartskin]

My wife calls me at work to tell me that the sump is full and overflowing. I ask her to make sure that the return pump is still working, she says it's fine, so Im stumped and tell her to take a pitcher and remove the water to the high water mark on the sump. Well about a few hours later she calls to tell me the "SUMP IS FULL AGAIN". Now it clicks. The week before I broke the float arm on my KM shut off and the night before had turned the RO/DI unit on to top off and left in ON.

I dropped my salinity from 1.026 to 1.018 overnight. It hurts to remember what even survived. I had a Orange Cap that was about 16" in diameter and it died as most things did.

But learned some valuable lessons #1 Don't run RO/DI unit directly to display tank.
#2 LEAVE NOTES TO SELF ABOUT IMPORTANT THINGS

 

[kstallbe]

#3 Move out of Wyoming

Sorry about your loss, heartbreaking

 

[KGJ]

FYI Flame angels are protogynous hemaphrodites- if you buy a few small ones and keep them together, generally one will change sex into the larger, dominant male and form a harem with the smaller females.

It doesn't ease the sting of the loss, but at least it's possible to start working towards getting a replacement back in the tank.

 

[jelwyoming]

Thanks for the encouragment!
KGJ...thanks for the info on the flames. I will keep that in mind.

My tank is going through a cycling again because if this. There must be more dead stuff in the rocks. Algae bloom almost overnight.
I guess that I'll be doing major water changes this weekend.