james3370
Premium Member
about 3am this morning i awoke to this urge for some apple juice (which i keep in the fridge at all times LOL), so i get up & go into the kitchen. on my way thru the living room, i get a whiff of this ever so slight "burning" smell.....think a piece of paper left in an ashtray that starts to smolder from the cigarette embers. so after a few swigs of apple juice, i go to investigate where the smell is coming from......
no sooner than i get to tank # 2 where the smell is clearly coming from do i see the return pump belch out a huge cloud of black smoke & soot & make this arcing noise, so i quickly jerk it's plug from the power strip(luckily i had everything in the power strips tagged). so it clearly took the dump of death :mad2: but i checked the snails & crabs in the tank & everybody seemed to be going about their merry way, so didn't look like an electrical charge put into the water.
luckily, the soot seemed to be confined to the return pump chamber, so i grabbed one of my water change containers, the section of garden hose & started syphoning it out (i still have that burned soot taste in my mouth....uuugh). i ended up draining out all the water in the rear chambers as well as what spilled over into them from the display area till the water level dropped below the skim slots. then i drained off a bit more of the display area water concentrating on the top surface mostly to get any remaining soot. all told, about 3 gallons which is right at my normal 20% water change amount LOL
it just so happens that tues night i had bought a small mini-jet 606 (160gph) pump for an ATO i was about to start constructing. so i put that lil pump in the return chamber & got the water recirculating. water seems to be clearing back up now & i'll prob change that pump out w/ a bigger one this weekend. i'm thinking the maxi-jet 900 for a nice :eek1: return flow coupled w/ the korila nano
it's a pure stroke of luck that i happened to be up right as it happened........
no sooner than i get to tank # 2 where the smell is clearly coming from do i see the return pump belch out a huge cloud of black smoke & soot & make this arcing noise, so i quickly jerk it's plug from the power strip(luckily i had everything in the power strips tagged). so it clearly took the dump of death :mad2: but i checked the snails & crabs in the tank & everybody seemed to be going about their merry way, so didn't look like an electrical charge put into the water.
luckily, the soot seemed to be confined to the return pump chamber, so i grabbed one of my water change containers, the section of garden hose & started syphoning it out (i still have that burned soot taste in my mouth....uuugh). i ended up draining out all the water in the rear chambers as well as what spilled over into them from the display area till the water level dropped below the skim slots. then i drained off a bit more of the display area water concentrating on the top surface mostly to get any remaining soot. all told, about 3 gallons which is right at my normal 20% water change amount LOL
it just so happens that tues night i had bought a small mini-jet 606 (160gph) pump for an ATO i was about to start constructing. so i put that lil pump in the return chamber & got the water recirculating. water seems to be clearing back up now & i'll prob change that pump out w/ a bigger one this weekend. i'm thinking the maxi-jet 900 for a nice :eek1: return flow coupled w/ the korila nano
it's a pure stroke of luck that i happened to be up right as it happened........
