No Power - how long will my tank last?

Sounds like you got it covered, but I thought I'd mention that on matt's thread someone mentioned that Walmart has battery powered air pumps in the fishing section for keeping live bait.

 

Thanks Bill!

Good luck! I think you have it covered.

 

Welp - the tank made it through the 4 hour power outage.

I ended up being able to run off of battery power the entire time. I used a 1000va batter backup I have for one of me computers. My return pump is a variable speed DC pump, so I cranks that down to about 25%, and set my MP40s to about 35% constant-on with only running one at a time. The lights, Skimmer, ATO, other pumps and BoiPellet reactors where all turned off. That brought the total tank power draw down to about 70-80 watts, and I was able to run it for a little over 2 hours with the battery. I then pulled another 1000VA batter backup off my wife's PC and ran it for another 2 hours.

By the time the lights came back on, I was down to less than 10 minutes of battery power left.

The only somewhat adverse effects I had was a lower than normal PH. It dipped to around 7.85, when it normally hangs around 8.0-8.2 during the day The temp in the house reached about 82F but the tank held pretty steady at around 77.6. Gotta' love those external DC pumps for no heat transfer

I'm going to leave the lights off for the rest of the day

Thanks for all the suggestions - I'm going to go through the list and add them to my R.E.A.L. "Reef Emergency Action List" :^)

 

great news! I might be cautious and keep the surface area agitated when you put the biopellets back on line.

 

I actually ran the outlet into a bucket for about a gallon of water just to be safe when I brought them back online. They had already started to clump pretty tightly together. My skimmer also overflowed for a few cup-fulls when I brought that back online as well. It all seems to be runngi well now though.

 

Awesome. Down to the last 10 minutes? You have to love life. Cheers

 

Great news tono. Did you have to float the frozen water or anything else for cooling?

 

Great news!
Hoping hurricanes don't cause too much of an issue this year-will add this info to my list for preparedness.

 

No - the tank temp stayed pretty steady. it appears my tank can cool off real quick, but does not heat up very fast. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that the return pump is an extern DC pump, so there's nearly zero heat transfer. It never when above 77.8, but even then, it was only there for about 30 minutes.

 

welp - I'm reviving this thread since I'm out of town, and just learned that the power has been out at the house since 4:15 this morning (about 4.0 hours ago as of this post). The battery backup I had setup would have lasted about 30-40 minutes, but after that the tank would be sitting stagnant. I have someone headed over there now, but they wont be there for another 30 minutes or so and the power company is estimating that the power wont be restored until around 11 am (another 3 hours or so).

Once my help gets there, I'll give them the info in this thread. In the meantime, any opinions on how long the tank could last without water movement? It's a 125, mixed reef with about 12 fish?