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Post by murdock6701 on Jun 3, 2009 19:09:24 GMT -5
lost power for about 30 hours yesterday - was fortunate enough to have one of those portable jumper boxes you can start a car with that has a small compressor for filling a flat tire on it - hooked that up to my computer battery backup sysytem add w/ a little surgical hose and some tape was able to supply air to ALL my tanks - heaters require more juice so had to unplug them as well as the computer - tank temps dropped to 65 - so far so good - did a 25% water change gradually today on all of them once the power was restored and slowly added warm water over 4 hours - almost back to normal - got lucky! supposed to freeze again tonight - thank God for the wood stove
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Post by bikeguy33 on Jun 3, 2009 21:07:21 GMT -5
great thinking...but would have expected no less from our staff engineer...
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Post by murdock6701 on Jun 3, 2009 21:15:17 GMT -5
thanks Bill, but I can't take all the credit - my computer battery backup kept cutting out - had to keep going in abd restetting it - power jump box was wife's idea!
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Post by kagome on Jun 3, 2009 23:57:06 GMT -5
Good thinking on both of your parts to patch things together and keep air flowing in the tanks. I am also worried about power failures now that it is hurricane season. We do have gas generators but you can't run those while it is still raining outside. I saw a battery backup thing that runs an airstone if the power goes out and I am thinking about getting one for each tank. At least if a hurricane hits I won't have to worry about heaters. It will probably be a hundred degrees in the house during the day and I'll have to run a fan on the tanks to cool them off. I hope that all of your fish are OK.
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Post by eve on Jun 4, 2009 1:13:40 GMT -5
great thinking i'm glad you got your power back  |
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Post by Carl on Jun 4, 2009 9:03:19 GMT -5
Glad you were able to keep your tank going. ;D Outside of some initial stress from cool temps, I think your fish will recover fine, normally I would not feed the fish during this time (they can easily go 48-72 hours without food), as this would not likely get eaten. I used Deep Cycle RV batteries with modified sine wave inverters connected to them for my LFS, with a generator for longer power outages. For my clients I invented a battery air pump back around 1985 that automatically would turn on an off with power failures (I wish I patented it). Now there are better yet ones that are as powerful as most heavy duty air pumps and run continuously, only switching to battery power when AC fails. Azoo and Nirox make the two best of these I have used.  Carl |
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Post by murdock6701 on Jun 4, 2009 16:47:52 GMT -5
thanks everyone! so far , so good - not even one casuality! not bad considering I have almost 200 fry of varoius ages and the temp change was over 15 degrees!
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Post by goldenpuon on Jun 4, 2009 17:03:21 GMT -5
Great job Murdock. You and your wife were thought outside the box and that is probably what saved your fish. Great job with all of them living as well. You must be taking really good care of them for them not to stress or die over that.
I will probably be buying a generator for my fish with money from my job. Better to be prepared than learn the hard way!
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Post by babygeige on Jun 4, 2009 19:49:12 GMT -5
Wow, I'm glad you didn't lose any fish! That's a long time to go without power. Fortunately, we have a generator that we use to run the essentials of the house. (water, fridge, family room lights and of course, TV ), so I can run a couple of extension cords to my tanks and at least keep the heaters and air pumps running. |
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Post by fishfever on Jun 4, 2009 23:07:36 GMT -5
Wow, 30 hours is a long time to be without power; usually when we lose power it's only a few hours (mostly storm outages). That jumper box is a great idea too for when the UPS battery runs down in a long outage like the one you had; it's got a pretty hefty battery for the small size. I haven't charged mine in a few weeks and have started several cars so I'll need to remember to plug mine in the wall tomorrow. It's good to know the fish can survive the temperature extremes (I guess it helps that the change is relatively gradual) so we can get away with just running the air for emergencies.
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Post by eve on Jun 5, 2009 14:53:57 GMT -5
fish are much hardier then we think
i saw/see it on mine
they had also a temperature change of 15-20 degrees down
most of the tanks are at 65 degrees, and i have neon tetras in those, which are really not the hardiest, but they're doing great
i'm glad you didn't loose any fish john, that's really great
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Post by brenda on Jun 6, 2009 18:50:48 GMT -5
Glas you fish are alright...30 hrs without power would suck not just for the fish but I wouldn't like it either.
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