For you whom run heaters in sump!!!!!!

I ran my heaters in sump until last night. My return pump decided to fry, while I was teaching class. So, for 8 hours and a snowstorm rolling in, my tank was heaterless. My tank rapidly dipped to 75 degrees.

My SPS are all but dead. There is very little coloring left in them. None at all in a couple.
My anenome is freaked out. He detached and moved across the tank.
Most of my softies are closed up as well.

My temps are slowly climbing. Hopefully, some of my pieces will recover.

Talk about a long sad night.

 

more.

If you want to see what everything looked like before hand, you can look at my build thread http://www.3reef.com/forums/show-off-your-fish-tanks/jonjons-150-sps-dominate-74217.html

Crappy part is I just got a good shipment 2 days ago.

 

wow, that really bites jon. real sorry to hear. but thnx for the warning regarding the sump.

 

hey im in kansas too!!!! you can give me some of your sps to hold if you want? i would be glad to help you out in anyway i can. i have a 200watt heater sitting around you could have for free?

 

Are you sure that it is from the temp change? Down to 75 is not that bad and esp only for 8 hours. That is not a major fluctuation.

IMO...one or two things happened:
1. when your pump fried it surged electricity into the system. From what I understand though, fish dont do well with surges but coral will usually do fine, so dont think this is it but you never know.
2. RTN. What kind of corals did you get a couple days ago? RTN can wipe out that much coral that fast. Leather will come back, it is just mad and shedding. I would bet though that it is RTN introduced from your new corals! I would personally pull all those white SPS out right now

I would do a water test ASAP though. Sorry for your loss.

 

Sorry to hear that, I had that same issue recently as well, although it was just my return pump seizing up from calcium carboante precipitation on the drive shaft from 2 part dosing.

I lost a bunch of SPS in that as well although I'm fairly certain my SPS were not in the best of health since I had just gotten my chemistry stable after a period of instability.

I've heard of SPS holding through temperature fluctuations of a few degrees all the time so I wonder if there wasn't another circumstance as well like there was in my tank. Lots of Acropora go through large swings regularly in the wild although I'm sure they are well used to that tidal and seasonal cycle.

The only way to prevent this that I've figured out is having 2 return pumps in the same sump, or having a controller that can send alerts via the internet. I'm using the AC3 on my new system. I have the temperature probe in the overflow and the heater in the sump so if the temperature in the overflow drops I know either my heaters died or my return pump stopped working. It makes me much less paranoid about equipment failure, the return pump is one of the few things that most people don't have failsafes/redundancy built into their systems for unfortunately.

Good luck with the recovery.

 

I am soooo sorry to hear about your troubles.... I have an aquatronic controller that I can access over the internet... good solution since I am in Germany now for business for a week. But what a bummer!!! Hope they will recuperate soon!!!!

 

Really sorry to hear!!

 

ouch sorry to hear, I know first hand how horrible it is to loose pieces

Good Luck
J

 

That's what I was thinking. My tank will range from 78-79 degrees to about 75 at night and my sps don't have any ill effects. I too have had my return run dry twice and my corals never reacted this way. IMO it may have triggered something, maybe it was a drop in Ph b/c of the lack of Oxygen in the tank.