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.