What a day . . . Tank Fiasco!!!

[chwkreefer]

Well, this morning I was awakened by my wife telling me that there was water on our carpets!.:shocked!: It turns out my skimmer went nuts and the drain line somehow didn't work according to my "fail safe" drain method. It always has for the past 2.5 years. (I'm modifying it now) I'd like to know what made my skimmer go that crazy.:mad:

I assume my skimmer pumped out between 12 and 25 gallons of water into my house. My tank is an inwall tank and divides my living room from my family room. The water managed to make it's way through the floor and ruined some of my drywall downstairs. I have a silent floor system which is all insulated and has soundboard and resilient metal strips for sound proofing.

So I had a restoration company come out and looks like I'm getting new laminate flooring in the family room.:biggrin: We are not sure how the carpets will turn out yet in the living room. . . and I just had a company come in last Friday to clean all our carpets!:lol:

The drywall, soundboard and insulation is all coming off downstairs. Thank goodness for insurance.:exclaim:

Because I have a water replacement system in place, my salinity dropped to 1.018. . . . which I'm slowing bringing back up now. So far only one species of sps shows signs of stress. The rest look fine. Me on the other hand. . . I think I showed some signs of stress too! :eek:



Bill

[niloc16]

man i'm really sorry to hear that man. i cant imagine the stress. i guess 'fail safe' is a pretty light term to use. good luck with the repairs

[Tangman]

SORRY ,to hear about your trouble Bill...... water messes are the worst!
If there is any thing that I could do to help just let me know..


Ron/ Tangman
BTW, the frags I got from you are doing great

[GMGQ]

Hey, I just had a skimmer overflow accident recently too! Two days ago, I came home from work, looked at my tank, then tweaked the knob on my CSS120 a twinge. I go to the back computer room for 1-1.5hrs. I go back to the kitchen area where the tank is, and the floor is drenched! Sure enough the 2L skimmate coke bottle was overflowing :S My salinity went down below 1.020 as well, in that short time.

Lucky i was home. I assume you didnt tweak anything before you went to bed though?

[chwkreefer]

SORRY ,to hear about your trouble Bill...... water messes are the worst!
If there is any thing that I could do to help just let me know..


Ron/ Tangman
BTW, the frags I got from you are doing great

Thanks for the offer Ron. I think everything is under control. The house should be back to normal in about 7 days!

Bill

[chwkreefer]

Hey, I just had a skimmer overflow accident recently too! Two days ago, I came home from work, looked at my tank, then tweaked the knob on my CSS120 a twinge. I go to the back computer room for 1-1.5hrs. I go back to the kitchen area where the tank is, and the floor is drenched! Sure enough the 2L skimmate coke bottle was overflowing :S My salinity went down below 1.020 as well, in that short time.

Lucky i was home. I assume you didnt tweak anything before you went to bed though?

I didn't do anything with the skimmer last night. I've never experienced a skimmer blasting that much skimmate before in my 13 years in the hobby.

Bill

[Murminator]

http://www.smilieshq.com/smilies/mad0222.gif (http://www.smilieshq.com)

Wow that sucks

[SeaHorse_Fanatic]

Dang. Good luck with the clean-up.

[chwkreefer]

Dang. Good luck with the clean-up.

Thanks,
Apparently the restoration company will get started on Thursday. It should take about a week.

[chwkreefer]

Well, finally everything looks to be dried out. The final drywall was ripped out Thursday morning. They should start boarding again on Friday. So, I'm without a sump and skimmer for probably a week. Also, I'm down about 1200 gallons per hours of circulation. I did manage to mickey mouse something together today to get my calcium reactor running on the system again today.

But finally tomorrow all the fans and dehumidifiers will finally be taken out of the house. Man was it noisy in our house for the last 7 days. It looks like it will be another week before my new flooring, drywall, finishing and painting is done and things go back to normal. I will be making a few modifications to my system to prevent that from ever happening again.

Does anyone in the Lower Mainland sell those "Screamers" that have a probe and detect moisture? I think I'm gonna pick one of those up. Having one of those could have prevented what I suspect is over $5000 in damage.

Usually, I look at my tank and it gives me peaceful tranquil thoughts. Right now I feel like slapping a forsale sign on the thing.

Well that bout does it for my rant . . . needed to get that off my chest. :lol:

[wild2cpl]

Hey there are water alarms that are fairly cheap these days. We run into these pobs all the time being a restoration firm. Home depot sells them for about $20-30.

[Tangman]

J&L sells the screamer that you mentioned ,check out that web site
Good to hear things are back to normal
Reguards.....

[christyf5]

Wow what a nightmare, at least you're back on track now.


Wendell at OA just got some of those screamer thingys in, it was on his new items page last week I think :biggrin:

[Pescador]

If you have a home security system you can add a water bug that sets off your alarm, mine's on a long cord coming from a wall jack so you can place it where you want. So even if you're not home they will phone you.

[chwkreefer]

The restoration guy is using a fast setting drywall mud . . . He said he wasn't leaving today (Friday) until everything was done on my fishtank walls. This way we could paint it Saturday and have my sump back in before the weekend was over. That is great news!!

I'm definitely planning on buying a "screamer".

[EmilyB]

Me too. Usually, I am the "screamer". :lol:

[Tangman]

Hey Bill, If you don't have your sump back in yet, is there any way you could put in a drain system in? , possibly with pond liner material or something? and a drain pipe say through the wall?
If you remember I am putting in a bigger sump and that's what I am doing. I am fiber glassing the floor and 4 inches up the wall under the tank and putting in a drain through the wall, this way if there is an over-flow the water just flows out side, instead of damaging the house.
Just an idea
Reguards..Ron

[chwkreefer]

Hey Bill, If you don't have your sump back in yet, is there any way you could put in a drain system in? , possibly with pond liner material or something? and a drain pipe say through the wall?
If you remember I am putting in a bigger sump and that's what I am doing. I am fiber glassing the floor and 4 inches up the wall under the tank and putting in a drain through the wall, this way if there is an over-flow the water just flows out side, instead of damaging the house.
Just an idea
Reguards..Ron

Hey Ron,
Actually when I built this set up 3 years ago, I did put in a floor drain that goes down to the crawlspace. . . and lined the bottom with fiberglass that goes up about 1.5" inches. The problem was that my container for my skimmate is in the closet beside this fiberglass liner. My container too has a JG fitting with a line that runs back to the floor drain. So I thought my bases were covered. But something set my skimmer to go absolutely nuts that night and my skimmate container couldn't drain fast enough I suppose and it ended up blowing the lid up. I will be making some mods to my skimmer and waste collection system. I like those waste collectors with the ping pong ball idea and will probably make one.

Also, I will be building a plexiglass liner to sit in my closet on top of my laminate flooring. I will put a bulkhead in the liner and run some pipe to dump any spilled water back to the floor drain. The floor drain empties into a larger rubbermaid in the crawlspace. I might change that up a bit too. I might hilti out a hole through the concrete foundation and run the drainline to the outside.

So far that part of the system has always been a fail safe set up. But I didn't see anything close to what my skimmer did that night ever in the past.

I will also add a "screamer" to the floor of the liner and so I will have an audible warning if a leak should occur. When we built the house I thought I had everything planned out so well for potential hazards. Overall I was happy with how disasters were always averted until last week. Lesson learned. Especially when you are on a second floor with a fully finished room below.