I am looking at a total loss...Learn from my mistake

[Dearth]

I talked with an American friend of mine today he is in the Hobby as well and he told me of his personal nightmare 3 years ago (He is a lurker on Canreef). He has a 300 gallon DT and a 155 gallon sump due to were he lives (Savanah, Georgia) almost all his plumbing, wiring and additives are outside of his house in a little over hang shed.

He had his ATO hooked up to the house water and had several redundancies built in couple of floor wet sensors, overflow sensors on his sump and display and several solenoid driven actuators that were designed to fail closed in event of an outage or water sensors tripped. Being as he is a licensed and certified Electrician and pipe fitter he knew what he was doing. He had backups for his backups but what he never counted on was Mother Nature.

His house received an indirect lightning strike while he and the wife were at work and the wiring in the shed took a direct hit all fried and rendered it useless now the actuators on the ATO system wired into his house water should of failed closed but unfortunately all 3 actuators failed open due to the power surge and frying the electronics in the solenoids. His oldest daughter came home from school and he received a panicked called from his wife whom his daughter contacted saying the floor was covered in water.

Bruce came home to find about a 1/3 inch of water on the floor his tank water a lovely shade of milk and the smell of burnt wiring. Problem was quickly sourced but damage was done. End result was $37,000 in water damage, roughly $9,000 in dead coral and fish and about 900 gallons of water sucked up and one devastated family. They figure the water was pouring into the sump then floor for about 8 hrs. After serious talk with his wife they decided to keep the tank going and 5 months after the disaster and repairs completed they got the tank up and running again. Now he has the house water pumped into a 100 gallon container with a separate ATO that runs from there to the sump and everything is hooked up to separate power sources with GF indicators now. Today he has a healthy vibrant tank again.

[dino]

I use a 5 gallon bucket on a gravity feed for this reason. its so simple and if my float fails it wont overflow my sump because it can take a extra 5 gallons.
I will donate any extras to you garry when your running although you used to be into a lot nicer corals than me.

[sobe]

Sorry to hear your loss. I cant even imagine how you felt coming home from that.

Im same boat as dino I lug a 5g jug and hooked up to an aqualifter. Its back breaking . The only nightmare i am afraid of is a leaking tank on a 2nd floor house with about 100g of water

I have some corals that can donate but they are not high ends. Just let me know if you are in the area.

[tang daddy]

Sorry to hear Gary, not much to say here that hasn’t been said already. Every time we make a mistake we learn something. A few years back I had a fully stocked Lps tank I ran up until summer without a chiller, lost the whole investment one day when the temp got over 29.... expensive lesson as most of the Lps was Aussie. No one to blame but myself for not spending money on a chiller, all my tanks now run a chiller.... with that said I also run my tank in the garage as I still have tons of spills on the floor, mostly from the rodi overfilling the ato which is about 30g. But the garage floor sucks up that moisture like the Sahara. Lots of people ask me why I don’t keep the tank inside, my simple answer is because I still make wet spots here and there, the other reason is it’s alot cooler in the garage which means I save abit on the cost of chilling my tank summer months....

Hope you have your new tank dialed in by summer next year.
Let me know if there’s any way I can help.

[shiftline]

Good to hear your sticking with it and moving forward!

One thing I have learned is to plan for redundancy and dual safety