Top up failed lost everything.

[juel]

Hi. So after 10 years of keeping tanks (2 tanks) I’ve had my first crash. Last weekend my top up failed and as a result no water got pumped from my sump. Tank was in an outbuilding so temps didn’t take long to go down to 10.

The only things that survived were 5 RBTAs which have been rehomed. So 5 days later and my tank is back up to decent temps but I haven’t removed or done anything. I have hundreds of pounds worth of live (was live) rock in there – is it actually worth anything now?

Second question. I’m about to move house and although I’ve spent the week saying
‘Never again’ it got me thinking about a super low maintenance tank in my new place. How big would a tank have to be and how few fish for it to be virtually zero maintenance? Would an 10ft 300g tank with just corals, cuc and a couple of tangs need weekly water changes? Would a tank with no fish but just invertebrates and live rock be maintenance free?

Many thanks

[smellynelly]

Never known a top up to cause a tank crash mate

[elfredanellyparker]

wow gutting news 🙁 are you sure it was just the atu? did the salinity shoot up or or heater failure or something

You can never be without a tank, say hi to J :wave:

[barefooted_elfreda]

When a top up fails, the return runs dry, after pumping millions of micro bubbles to dt, then as there is no flow the heater can’t heat the dt.
I’ve had a qt plummet to 14°C on heater failure and the bacteria survived, so if you got the dt heated in time you may well have viable live rock still, yes there will be massive die off, but it should still be salvageable given time to process the ammonia, I’m honestly gutted for you, I had a very close escape with my entire livestock due to a power failure (my fault) but it was remidied within a few hours so no losses at 23.5°C

[parker_the_barker]

thanks all – I’m just going to leave it and see if it sorts itself out.

Yep, top up failed, sump drained and no heater in the tank. 🙁

Hi T – Jakes good – he’s a big bro now!

D

[welly_nelly]

Gutted for you as the last pics I saw of the tank looked bloody awesome.
Congrats :clap: on the other news.

[helly_nelly]

I agree, many moons ago I work in a LFS We had shipments of live rock from Fiji, this was flown in. I was just rock packed into a box.. goodness only knows what temperatures it was exposed to. There be a bit of die off and good to go.. I would say quite resilient!

[Author]

Posts