Thanks guys! It all worked out ok, other than me being a completely ruined mess today for lack of sleep. My car wasn't able to run the return pump, which would have been optimal, but it was able to run an MP40, MP60, and the pump for the biopellet reactor no problem. I had to manually lift my garage door in the pitch black and do everything with a flashlight (my house is DARK with no power), and I scavenged an extension cord that was part of my ATO system in the basement and daisy chained it with another extension cord and a power bar with a really long cord to get it to reach.
Power was only out for about 3 hours, which in the grand scheme of things probably wouldn't have hurt the tank at all, but when I talked to Enmax they said that at that time of night it would take 2 hours for them to even get a crew to our area, and then depending on what had caused the fault, could take an indeterminate amount of time to fix. He said they usually get it back up within two hours of getting to the site, but when the faults are caused by several days of hot weather and involve underground lines it can take 6 hours or more for them to bypass them. I didn't feel like waiting for three hours and be faced with an emergency recovery situation at 3am if the power didn't come back on until today.
I think I'm still gonna consider a generator though, after 2 hours of running three pumps the adapter in the car was freaking hot and starting to smell like burning plastic. Not sure it would have lasted much longer, and I don't like the idea of needing to run my car in the garage during a power outage.
On another note, having zero flow in my tank for the 40ish minutes it took me to get everything hooked up and running was enough to create the creepiest and grossest bristleworm bonanza on my sand. I'm starting to wonder if it's actually a problem. They ALL came out. I took a video that I'm trying to figure out how to upload to photobucket, it's well and truly gross. My tank's biomass is easily 50% bristleworms.
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