PDA

View Full Version : Never a dull moment in Reefland!


Lance
12-12-2010, 05:27 PM
I get up this morning and come downstairs looking forward to my Sunday morning cup of Timmy's. Instead I hear the unpleasant sound of a powerhead sucking air. The water level in the 90g is down 3" and the MP20 is sucking half air/half water. The Foxface is hysterical, dashing about crashing into everything, and all other fishes are in hiding. Poccillipora colony is half exposed to the air and covered in slime. The sump is, of course, 90% full and the skimmer is overflowing everywhere! FML!
For whatever reason, the return pump (Mag 950) has failed. I unplug the skimmer and the pump, run to the garage to grab the back-up pump, (old faithful Sedra KSP 7000), put in on-line and plug it in. Nothing! WTF! I take the pump out and plug it into a wall socket and away it goes. Hmmmm? I plug it back into the powerbar: nothing! The skimmer, two dosing pumps, and refugium lights are all plugged into the same powerbar and they're all working. So I plug the pump into a different outlet on the powerbar and away it goes. One outlet on the 6 outlet PB is dead. Weird! Never seen that before.
So I do a 25g water change, replace the carbon, blow the slime off the corals, clean the skimmer and plug it back in. It doesn't go on! Grrrrrrrrrr!!! Take it apart, clean it all up, plug it in again and it still doesn't go on. I'm about 2 seconds away from getting a large hammer and smashing all of this electronic crap into teeny weenie pieces! Calm Down. Step Away. Go get your coffee. And that's where I am at the moment, having my coffee, while I vent on Canreef. Sometimes I think more tank problems are caused from faulty, crappy equipment than anything else.

Dyspnea
12-12-2010, 05:34 PM
Smashing something always make me feel better, until I realize I made a bigger mess and have too clean it up :p That really sucks hopefully everything rebounds well.

Skimmerking
12-12-2010, 05:42 PM
Lol lance you have patience my reef friend me I would haveect it and we t for a coffee.





No I wouldn't I would done the same thing

Mrfish55
12-12-2010, 05:55 PM
Kinda makes you wonder why this is considered a hobby, I thought hobbies are supposed to be stress reducing and fun all the time.

lastlight
12-12-2010, 05:58 PM
What's with all the crap luck lately. Power through Lance this seems to be the way it is!

Lance
12-12-2010, 05:59 PM
Lol lance you have patience my reef friend me I would haveect it and we t for a coffee.





No I wouldn't I would done the same thing


Trust me Mike, I was pretty close to walking the pump, powerbar and skimmer to the edge of the sundeck and throwing them all into the fish pond in the back yard!

Lance
12-12-2010, 06:06 PM
Kinda makes you wonder why this is considered a hobby, I thought hobbies are supposed to be stress reducing and fun all the time.


Stress? What stress? Nothing a half bottle of Xanax washed down with a glass of Grey Goose can't handle. :lol:

fishoholic
12-12-2010, 06:08 PM
How annoying, hopefully the coffee helps and you're able to figure it out.

If it makes you feel any better I have a busy reef day today too. I plan on shutting down my 20g cube and moving stuff over to the 230g reef. However since I haven't been doing much upkeep on the 20g I have to take whatever sps I want to keep and re-attach them to different rock, bring the sps I don't want to my friend, and I have to scrub all the unwanted algae off of the rock I want to keep (mostly the rock the zoas are on) and add it to the 230g display. So much for my relaxing Sunday of doing nothing. Now I'm thinking it would be easier to do the water change on it and leave it running for a bit longer :lol: Guess I can't procrastinate forever though!

PoonTang
12-12-2010, 06:18 PM
Don't feel too bad Lance, I have flooded my house 3 times in the last two weeks.

Lance
12-12-2010, 06:27 PM
Don't feel too bad Lance, I have flooded my house 3 times in the last two weeks.


And you're still living there? Or in the doghouse in the back yard?

Cranky When Wet
12-12-2010, 06:51 PM
Hear you loud n' clear and know the pain.:laluot_08:

Question: by any chance was the freaking power bar one of those "programmable" ones?

I've had issues with those. A few power bumps and some (not all) of the plug-in slots stopped timing process (or reset to nothing, who knows).... lost all smaller life forms in my nano tanks. Beginning to think I need a windmill and solar farm in backyard but city bylaws don't allow total freedom of expression.... dang them to _ell.....

Hope the rest of your day goes better man,

Curious Bunny

Lance
12-12-2010, 07:03 PM
Hear you loud n' clear and know the pain.:laluot_08:

Question: by any chance was the freaking power bar one of those "programmable" ones?

I've had issues with those. A few power bumps and some (not all) of the plug-in slots stopped timing process (or reset to nothing, who knows).... lost all smaller life forms in my nano tanks. Beginning to think I need a windmill and solar farm in backyard but city bylaws don't allow total freedom of expression.... dang them to _ell.....

Hope the rest of your day goes better man,

Curious Bunny


Nope, just an everyday power bar from Canadian Tire plugged into a GFCI.

PoonTang
12-12-2010, 07:13 PM
And you're still living there? Or in the doghouse in the back yard?

Of course! If I didn't then who would clean up the mess? First one was when my son decided to rince the dog puke out of her blanket and threw it in the laundry sink turned on the hot water then walked off to have breakfast. The wife found the flood about 1/2 hour later. There was atleast 40 gal on the floor because we had completely run out of hot water. Second event was a broken pipe due to the recent cold snap and me not remembering to take the garden hose off the tap. Good flood that one too, cost me some drywall and insulation. Last one was my ato started to back syphon into my kalk bucket. Put atleast 5 gallons of salty kalk water onto the hardwood floors and out into the hallway carpet. So they all come in 3's don't they? Hopefully I'm done :(

marie
12-12-2010, 07:40 PM
Night before last I was ready for bed and went down to top up my sump and found water on the floor and the sump down 4" (about 3G of water on the floor). After checking everything I found a loose fitting on the calcium reactor that was leaking, drained the calcium reactor, tightened the fitting, checked the pump and took the opportunity to clean the impeller.
After it was all back together I stayed up for another hour to make sure it wasn't leaking....water was still dripping, Grrrr. Checked everything, touched the cap on the pump and water started pouring out, I hadn't replaced the cap on the pump correctly...so drain the reactor again......I got about 2 hours sleep that night :lol:

spawn
12-12-2010, 08:32 PM
Yesterday while doing my weekly water change the pump I use for the re-fill wouldn't go, so I threw it off the deck. About 5 mins later went got it played around for about 20mins & got it going because I don't like buckets. Moral of the story for me is to wait about 25 mins before throwing things.

kien
12-12-2010, 08:40 PM
Sweet! A "something went terribly wrong and I need to vent" thread!

Last weekend I noticed that one if the lines on my doser had fallen off. There are two lines that attach to the doser head righ? Guess which one it was?? Dosed a weeks worth of calcium onto the floor of my stand.
Lucky for me I had the forethought to raise my controller and doser off the floor in case of a spill or leak otherwise it would have been much uglier..

Lance
12-12-2010, 09:07 PM
Night before last I was ready for bed and went down to top up my sump and found water on the floor and the sump down 4" (about 3G of water on the floor). After checking everything I found a loose fitting on the calcium reactor that was leaking, drained the calcium reactor, tightened the fitting, checked the pump and took the opportunity to clean the impeller.
After it was all back together I stayed up for another hour to make sure it wasn't leaking....water was still dripping, Grrrr. Checked everything, touched the cap on the pump and water started pouring out, I hadn't replaced the cap on the pump correctly...so drain the reactor again......I got about 2 hours sleep that night :lol:


D'oh :doh:

Delphinus
12-12-2010, 10:01 PM
Fun times. I almost participated in this because I started typing in a story about what happened to me 2 weeks ago which in the end cost me my large squamosa clam, the largest clam I had ever seen in anyone's tank and coincidentally my oldest clam too. But then my phone ate my reply. The Blackberry Pearl Flip is now universally recognized as the worst phone Blackberry has ever made, which strangely enough doesn't make me feel any better about it but is neither here nor there. Anyhow rather than type it all in again I'd rather not relive the moment. Suffice it to say crappy moments abound in this hobby.

Anyhow, Lance, sorry to hear but at least you've figured things out. Things should recover. I know what you mean about the Foxface, my rabbit is the first to get hysterical about things and actually usually goes into this weird comatose state if startled enough. Weird phenomena, I wonder how that helps escapes predators or whatever it is that makes fish scared in the wild. Maybe it makes them invisible to other fish.

Lance
12-12-2010, 10:49 PM
Anyhow, Lance, sorry to hear but at least you've figured things out. Things should recover. I know what you mean about the Foxface, my rabbit is the first to get hysterical about things and actually usually goes into this weird comatose state if startled enough. Weird phenomena, I wonder how that helps escapes predators or whatever it is that makes fish scared in the wild. Maybe it makes them invisible to other fish.


Everything is looking ok now. The big Pocci has stopped sliming and its polyps are out again, and the Foxface has calmed down enough and even ate a little. Rabbitfish are pretty weird all right. I have a large Foxface in the 225g, he's about 7" long. In the evening, after lights out I cover the tank with egg crate panels to stop jumpers. The other night something startled him and he hit the egg crate so hard he lifted the whole panel and moved it a couple of inches. This is a 32" x 24" piece of egg crate! I thought for sure he must have given himself brain damage, but the next day he was perfectly fine except for a couple of small scratches on his head. Dumbass!

christyf5
12-12-2010, 11:37 PM
My favorite is the story about how a $1000 controller setup is repeatedly confounded by several tiny brittle stars that make their way into the topoff sensor (and I'm not talking about just hanging around it, actually making it into the space between the float and the cylindrical tube it floats on), raising the float valve and as a result end up dumping half of my topoff water into the sump (half you say?, the valve should only move like a half inch which isn't that much water! no, not in the world of Aquatronica). Nothing like filling your topoff tank with 30 gal of water only to hear the alarm go off at about 2am (I think its programmed to only go off between 2am and 6am, cause thats when its guaranteed you'll be sleeping and it goes off every 5 seconds) and when you get downstairs most of what was in the topoff tank is gone. The first time it happened I was sure there was a leak in the topoff tank until I ended up marking the level in the sump and four days later sure enough there it was again.

My sympathies Lance. There is nothing worse than unplugging a perfectly working piece of equipment to clean it, only to plug it in a few minutes later and its deader than a doornail. Friggin hobby!