8 hours of top off/flooding kills almost everything

[nrosdal]

in case anyone was wondering what would happen if your ato broke or like me you decided to manually top off your tank and forgot to turn it off overnight(because my float valve has been acting up and i wanted to be safe:redface:).


the end result is a very wet floor and 90% of corals dead. the salinity went down to 1.009 and sat there for 8ish hours before i went down and found all the goodness. i have since brought it back to 1.02 ish and will slowly bring it back to normal from here over the next couple days.

it looks like a few things may survive, i am hoping that my carpet nem is one of them... it has mildly improved since bringing water back in reasonable range.

anyways, i just wanted to share my story and remind everyone once again to limit the amount of water available to your ato/fill valve.

i will post some pics over the next few days and show if anything recovers.

and maybe start posting in the fowlr forum for a while as most of the fish seem to have made it through

[Flash]

awww that sucks.... sorry buddy

[SeaHorse_Fanatic]

Ouch. That's why I use a 5g salt bucket for my top-up.

[lpsreefer]

It would be nice to have an ato with a built in salinity sensor. That way once the salinity drop to 1.024 the ato would turn off.

[Mike-fish]

I feel for you man I did that earlier this month too. Some of the zoos in that tank are coming back but so far none of the mushrooms have came back:( all the fish seem to be rebounding nicely now I just have to contend with a cyno bloom. Keep positive that your corals will come back. My top off system as I use it for multiple tanks scattered around the house is simply a 1/4" line that I drag to the appropriate tank and open the valve and the ro unit turns on and stays on till I close the valve again. Simple but very risky we are retro fitting the system with a pair of solenoid valves rigged to a timer that will open them for a user set time period then close them after that amount of time. And to keep from relying on the valves to work to shut things down it will have a stand alone manualy cleared timer as well to make it hard to ignore/ forget about.

[Leah]

Oh no! Sorry to hear.

[mseepman]

Ouch Nick! That sucks. If you ever want some blue mushrooms to re-populate your corals...just ask.:twised:

[burgerchow]

Ouch. That's why I use a 5g salt bucket for my top-up.

+ 1.

[Nano]

+2 mind you 5g of fw in ky tank would drop the salinity pretty dangerously as well

[Lance]

:cry:

[nrosdal]

well, i just went down and checked for improvements and here is my update


Dead:

sebae anemone 12"
frogspawn
hammer
torch
acans
kenya tree

Still alive (might make it)

carpet anemone
polyps

not the best of turn outs.. but very happy and surprised that the carpet has made it through so far.

Mark, those mushrooms almost are appealing right about now... are you sure you have any extras to spare?:razz:

thanks all for condolences

my new ato plan is going to include a 3.5gal ro storage tank that i will fill when needed and will be the only water available to float switch in tank. Been meaning to do this for a while now, lesson learned i guess.

pics coming...

[nrosdal]

i also just noticed that my Seneye sent me an email saying that my ph was way low an hour after i forgot to shut it off... kinda wish i had my emails with a ring on my phone not silent.

here is a chart of the last few days in the tank... ph shouws where things got a bit off track... ammonia has gone up quite a bit with all the die off.

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/seneyechartsaug10-13.jpg

here is the bucket of sadness

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/2012-08-13110632.jpg

and yesterdays fts

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/2012-08-12192849.jpg

and a fts from a week or 2 back

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/2012-06-28210020.jpg

[Borderjumper]

That's good news that the nem is going to pull thru! And like the others, I'm very sorry for your losses.

[marblesab]

Ugh, thats heart breaking. So sorry for the loss!

[Sunee]

That's terrible! Sorry for your losses.

[mike31154]

I've got plenty of Kenya Tree frags if you'd like to repopulate your tank with those. Could also break off a piece of Hammer, it's getting pretty big again.

[nrosdal]

thanks for the offers guys, but i am gonna try to get things back where they should be for a while and make a plan before i start adding things again.

However, if anyone as some mangroves in the okanagan valley i would love to buy a few and try to go that way insted of cheato this time and see how it works.

here are a few pics of the survivors, they seem to be making improvements so things are looking up :smile:


orange carnation surprisingly stuck it out and looks semi ok
http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/2012-08-13152712.jpg

carpet nem
http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/2012-08-13152800.jpg

polyps
http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/2012-08-13152752.jpg

[daniella3d]

My JBJ auto-topoff has a fail safe so it will never fill more than for 3 minutes worth of water. Pretty much fool proof and been working flawlessly for 2 years, both of them (2 aquariums equiped with one).

So I limite the water available? no need to :)



in case anyone was wondering what would happen if your ato broke or like me you decided to manually top off your tank and forgot to turn it off overnight(because my float valve has been acting up and i wanted to be safe:redface:).


the end result is a very wet floor and 90% of corals dead. the salinity went down to 1.009 and sat there for 8ish hours before i went down and found all the goodness. i have since brought it back to 1.02 ish and will slowly bring it back to normal from here over the next couple days.

it looks like a few things may survive, i am hoping that my carpet nem is one of them... it has mildly improved since bringing water back in reasonable range.

anyways, i just wanted to share my story and remind everyone once again to limit the amount of water available to your ato/fill valve.

i will post some pics over the next few days and show if anything recovers.

and maybe start posting in the fowlr forum for a while as most of the fish seem to have made it through

[paddyob]

Ouch. That's why I use a 5g salt bucket for my top-up.

+1... well mine is 12G

I always heard running a direct line was insane. This is not
Uncommon to hear about over running and flooding.

Sucks. Hope you rebound on the up side.

Sorry for your loss.

[nrosdal]

ammonia seems to keep going up... i moved all the rock around searching for dead things that i may have missed only to find big piles of dead bristleworms under each rock. and sucked em up/did a 20g water change. Which has dropped it a bit, but i have a feeling i am gonna have to keep this up for a bit before things normalize. Below it is pretty easy to see where the big water change happened.

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/ammonia-1.jpg

the bonus of the day was while moving rocks i did a tally of the fish i could see and All fish are officially alive. Very happy about that as my female lion was very bloated and hiding for the last couple days.

[sphelps]

My JBJ auto-topoff has a fail safe so it will never fill more than for 3 minutes worth of water. Pretty much fool proof and been working flawlessly for 2 years, both of them (2 aquariums equiped with one).

So I limite the water available? no need to :)

Does the fail safe reset if the power cycles?

Sorry for your losses Nick.

[Seriak]

That is why I like the tunze ATO. It has an upper float valve that will prevent the ATO from filling if it is over a certain level. I have also combined this with a 10 gallon resevoir that shouldn't kill anything even if everything was dumped into my system. The only problem is I only get about 5 days before my resevoir is empty so someone does have to fill it when I go away for a week.

Sorry for your loss.

[nrosdal]

water parameters are back to where they should be, and the sole survivor seems to be doing much better. Was very tempted today to start re-stocking when i saw a very large elegance coral at the store.. but have decided rearrange rocks and try to make a plan before i start buying pretty things.

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/2012-08-18174650.jpg

[ashr]

Im really sorry for your loss! Hope it gets better soon!

Also what is the www.seneye.me you are using

[nrosdal]

seneye is a small device that reads the ph/ammonia and also has a par/lux meter for checking light output. It just sits in my sump plugged into an old laptop computer and emails me if things go out of wack. Here is a link to some info. They are cool i use mine mainly so i don't need to check ph and ammonia has only ever spiked after mass die off. pretty useful if you don't have an apex or something like that.

http://reefsupplycanada.com/cgi-bin/p/awtp-product.cgi?d=reef-supply-canada&item=58402

[nrosdal]

With a little push from a friend i have an update.

Carpet survived, orange carnation never pulled through, and still have the polyp rock in an extra sump chamber. I have re-populated with similar style(carpet now takes up much more room).

i have made a few equipment changes with the most important being that i don't have ato directly plumbed anymore. Well, i do but... it is plumbed into a ro storage tank which i open the valve and fill then shut so only 3.5-4 gal is what is avail to the tank at any time except for when filling.

Here are some pics i took not to long ago of how things have come along.

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/IMG_1169_zps318775e7.jpg

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/IMG_1164_zpseb7b6c38.jpg

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/IMG_1163_zps91a0e483.jpg

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/IMG_1157_zpsdd355040.jpg

[nrosdal]

Still a work in progress..

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/IMG_1196_zpsea2f0bdd.jpg

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/IMG_1200_zps2b9ef17a.jpg

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/IMG_1197_zps9039cc96.jpg

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d99/sheetmetal/IMG_1213_zpsfded3c47.jpg

[Jakegr]

The tank looks beautiful again. It is pretty amazing the carpet anemone not only survived, but now looks like it is flourishing again.

[LeanneP]

Your carpet nem is beautiful!! So glad you didn't lose it too. That sucks about your tank but it looks like it is rebounding well. So stressful, but look on the bright side. Now you get to do some more shopping!! Hope all goes well for you now.

Leanne

[Skimmerking]

Sorry for ur loss nick tank is looking really good

[mseepman]

Haha...I wonder who would give you a push like that!:twised:

Tank is looking good and so are those lights! Which ones are those again?:wink:

[xenon]

Hard lesson.

We never use a top-off container larger than what would fit in the sump if our ATO fails.

[kien]

yikes! Sorry to hear man.. I lose sleep over this worry. To combat Murphy here I too use a smaller ATO reservoir (8g) as well as a secondary emergency shut-off float switch to kill the ATO pump in the event that the water gets too high in the sump.

[SeaHorse_Fanatic]

Wow, sorry to read about your disaster. I use a 5g salt bucket for my ATO & this is one of the reasons why. Ouch. Glad things are on the mend though.

[HarleyC]

:(

[nrosdal]

Haha...I wonder who would give you a push like that!:twised:


Probably a nice fellow that was trying to get around doing some wrench turning on the wet end of his pump :)

Tank is looking good and so are those lights! Which ones are those again?:wink:

They are the Evergrow D120s LEDs from the Canadian retailer who has designed quite a nice full spectrum layout for the light.


Thanks all for the encouragement. I have a Video i made when i was reviewing the LEDs when they first arrived. I might take off the audio of me droning on about dimmer knobs and lighting spectrum and post it a bit later if i get a chance. Then you can see some fishies swimming around.

Nick

[daniella3d]

yes as it is a mecanical settings, which you adjust with a little screw.

Anything can fail but if the jbj fail, it will rather stop working instead of flooding the tank.

It's pretty much fool proof. In case of power outage, it will simply resume working once the power is back because it is relying on the float switch. If the float switch gets stuck, it will work 3 minutes (adjustable) max.

Does the fail safe reset if the power cycles?

Sorry for your losses Nick.

[nrosdal]

Here is the video of my tank from not to long ago. Just turn volume down/off so you don't have to listen to my ramblings. I wish i knew how to take out audio and edit in some majestic music(or a Justin Beiber song).

http://youtu.be/mDpyHmfYjwM