Who is ready

[kien]

I would say that I am ready but only up to a certain point. There is so much that can go wrong that no matter how much you plan and prepare, there will come a point in time where an event occurs that is beyond your planning and preparation.

My tank has been hit by quite a few events that I never accounted for. Each time one happened though, I add it to my list of contingency plans.

1. Determine the bare minimal set of equipment the tank needs to survive. Water flow, bubbler, heater. The tank can survive on just those three things for quite a while.

2. Have vital equipment backup. I have a spares of heaters, powerheads, return pump, ATO.

3. Have a generator and/or battery backup. When I first started I never thought I'd ever need one. Well, after the great Calgary flood of 2013 my mind was changed. It's better to have one and not need one than need one and not have one. When that flood hit we lost power for a day. I had to scramble in the storm to find one, along with thousands of other people in the city who had lost power. I did manage to find one and put my tank on life support with the bare minimum running (see #1 above). That generator saved my tank. Thankfully the outage was only one day, and it was near summer so it wasn't cold out, but the outage could have easily been worse.

4. Vacation planning. Have a tank sitter and have a plan! When you go away, make sure you have a backup plan for your tank sitter as well. I like to have a full Rubbermade brute full of NSW and my 50g RO reservoir full. I let my tank sitter know where all my spare equipment is in case something fails. I've had my ATO crap out while on vacation. Luckily it was no big deal as my tank sitter was able to just swap it out for the spare.

This past Christmas my controller crapped out shutting off all my heaters. Being a programmable powerpower, I had decided to program it to shut OFF the heaters in the event that the controller craps out (ie, no communications with controller), rather than staying ON, which is what all the other sockets (return pump, skimmer, reactors, etc) are programmed to. I've learned that surviving a cold tank is more likely than surviving an overheated tank. I don't trust heaters. It got pretty cold in the tank, it's winter and the furnace was off, so this outage hit many of my corals hard, but luckily I had a spare heater that my tank sitter could just drop into the sump. This was easier than trying to figure out the maze of wires that the existing heaters and controller are strung to. One other thing I learned from this outage is that if I ever go away on vacation again, I would leave the heat in the house on. It's a sensible safety precaution. If I had left the heat on in the house the tank probably would not have dropped as cold as it did.

5. Do not underestimate the power of the Dark Lord of Fate, Darth Murphyous.