No Power - how long will my tank last?

Oh man I am sorry to hear this Antonio. I think it will be ok until your friend gets there due to the water volume. Fingers crossed.
Did you get one of those battery air pumps yet?

What a drag.

 

I don't think water movement would be a problem for that short amount of time.

+1 for the inverter. I have one I've never had to use.. knock on wood.

 

Unfortunately I did not. Prior to the last scheduled outage, we had not had a power outage that lasted for than a minute or two 3-4 years, if no more. I didn't think I needed one, an then Murphy reminded me I did... :-/

That would have been an option, but I took my inverter with me


My Help arrived and was able to run an extension cord from a neighbors house across the street and restore power to the tank. Then about 10 minutes after the tank got up and running, they reported a bad smell coming from the tank. They said is smelled like dirty tank water.

Last time I spoke to them, all fish appeared to be OK. my fingers are crossed

 

I've had tanks sit much longer than that without the slightest issue. It wouldn't bother me at all as far as flow. Your tank is big enough with low fish load so seems fine to me. If the temp creeps up that's a different story.
Most corals will start to die around 87-88 degrees if the temp stays there long enough. When my heater malfunctioned temp went up to around 90 and all fish were fine but probably couldn't live in that for days.

 

That's good info, and I've heard similar accounts with little or no ill effects on their tanks. I'm always afraid to test the upper limits my self, although I've also read that the occasional and controlled stressful situations can actually benefit your reef tank and allow it to better handle real emergencies.

With that said - I just got word that the power has been fully restored to the house. I was able to t access the controller and the worst issue I see is that the ORP dropped to 230. I believe that's extremely low. it stayed there a short period and quickly came back up to around 260, and then on to 289, which is closer to normal (around 300).

I guess another power outage survived...

 

That is good news. The smell might have been the stagnate water moving around - or perhaps - does your skimmer flood out after a power outage? Mine used to do that.

 

I had not considered that - It doesn't usually, but it might have with it sitting so long. I didn't hear anything from the afternoon guy that comes in to check on the tank, so all must be good. I did however lose the video camera I trained on the tank - it never recovered after the outage. so I cant do a quick visual check of tank from my location.