Our power was out for 12 hours on Thursday night with the thunder and lightning storm that hit the Lower Mainland.

I lost 90% of my livestock in a 5 day power outage in the big windstorm in winter of 2006. The 10% that survived (including fish) had no heaters and no circulation pumps so they can withstand some pretty poor conditions.

After that loss, I have upgraded in tank size twice. All I have invested in is a battery powered air pump. It is one I got at Petsmart that plugs into an outlet and turns on when the power goes out - it costs less than $15. In the 12 hours, the temperature in my 90 gallon only dropped by a few degrees. Oxygenating the water and keeping a little flow going was enough to breeze through the outage with no problems.

I have two of the battery powered air pumps that sense power is off in my 77. An inexpensive, but effective way to get you through a shorter outage. It's a good idea to have a look at the internals of these battery powered pumps though, I remember reading about one frying up due to a short circuit. While it is powered by a couple of batteries, there is also 120 volts in there for the small sensing relay which switches the pump on when AC power is lost. Mine are ok, but the build quality/soldering under the cover where the relay is can vary. To be expected from an inexpensive item like this.

Another alternative is to simply have a deep cycle 12 volt battery on hand & an inverter. I have an old car battery outside with a small solar panel keeping it charged up. An inverter hooked up to this could keep minimum lighting & a few air pumps/powerheads going for quite a while. In fact, if you have VorTech powerheads, with a small DC adapter you could hook the 12 volt battery directly to the backup power pin on the controller. Heater is another matter, they draw a lot of juice. I'm a bit hesitant to run a car in a garage to be able to use that battery. Last time I experienced an outage of more than 5 hours, I removed the battery from my truck (it's a diesel & has 2). Of course you'd need to re install it & run the vehicle to charge it before it's down too far. Seems we're fortunate here in the interior of BC, very few outages that last any amount of time. In Vernon we're only a few hours away from Revelstoke & the huge dam/power generating station there.

Battery backup
 

Wouldn't an ecotech battery backup do the trick for mp"s? That what I'm relying on.

If you have one, certainly and it's advantage is that like the battery operated backup air pumps, it will automatically take over during an outage, great if you're not around. It will be limited by the size of the battery inside though & you'll only be able to replace it with EcoTech parts, which is fine unless you need to wait for them to be shipped. A larger deep cycle or car battery is much easier to source and can potentially keep the powerheads going much longer. With a little more effort & a second battery, you could hook them up in series to get 24 volts & full power to the VorTech. Downside is you need to be around to do it & of course these batteries will be much larger, plus you'll need to take safety precautions if they're flooded batteries, which most of them are.

When the power goes, you do what you can with what you have.