Hurricane Prepping

TangoTang · Aug 30, 2019

With Hurricane Dorian coming towards Florida, we could be expecting some power loss. I have battery backups that I can run my return and flow and so forth but in the case that I run out of full power on everything, how long can the water be stagnant?

The reason for asking is because today I went to purchase mixed salt water from my LFS and was told if the water in the sump lasts more than 2 hours without any movement then I should change it out before I turn on the return or ill kill everything in the display....

Anyone is welcome to chime in on the subject and help me with my question please but as of now I've been following Mr. Saltwater Tank's Emergency Checklist and if anyone has other tips and or things that I should have prepared or just any piece of advice to have in mind for something like this, ill highly appreciate it and hopefully fellow Florida reefers can help out and get some info from this thread as well

Thanks to everyone ;Pompus

xiholdtruex · Aug 30, 2019

I would just throw a battery powered bubbler in the sump to keep some flow going. I think it takes a bit more than two hours to kill off everything in the sump. Keep some prime on hand just in case and if you run out of all power try to keep movement going in both tank and sump with egg crate or spoons. It will be tedious but hopefully it will keep the tank till you can get some back up hopefully from #305reefclub

SneakyTortuga · Aug 30, 2019

i mean ive forgotten to turn my return back on over night and have just turned it on the next day with no issues

xiholdtruex · Aug 30, 2019

SneakyTortuga said:
i mean ive forgotten to turn my return back on over night and have just turned it on the next day with no issues

me too a few times when feeding

TangoTang · Aug 30, 2019

xiholdtruex said:
I would just throw a battery powered bubbler in the sump to keep some flow going. I think it takes a bit more than two hours to kill off everything in the sump. Keep some prime on hand just in case and if you run out of all power try to keep movement going in both tank and sump with egg crate or spoons. It will be tedious but hopefully it will keep the tank till you can get some back up hopefully from #305reefclub

thanks brotha, yeah thats a good idea, ill throw a bubbler in the sump. and you can never forget the spoon method!

thanks for the help!

how's everything looking for you?

TangoTang · Aug 30, 2019

SneakyTortuga said:
i mean ive forgotten to turn my return back on over night and have just turned it on the next day with no issues

yeah, havent we all, even when changing things around during a water change or rearranging the aquascape I go over that and doesn't seemed to affect anything.

thank you for your help

xiholdtruex · Aug 30, 2019

TangoTang16 said:
thanks brotha, yeah thats a good idea, ill throw a bubbler in the sump. and you can never forget the spoon method!

thanks for the help!

how's everything looking for you?

Good so far shutters up, and just waiting to see what happends about to feed and then do a water change lol actually looking for frags to buy haha

TangoTang · Aug 30, 2019

SneakyTortuga said:
i mean ive forgotten to turn my return back on over night and have just turned it on the next day with no issues

Just noticed you're from ft. Lauderdale, how's the prepping going?

TangoTang · Aug 30, 2019

xiholdtruex said:
Good so far shutters up, and just waiting to see what happends about to feed and then do a water change lol actually looking for frags to buy haha

hahaha never a bad time to get some frags, sorry I couldnt make it to the meetup btw, got home around 10 that day. read on the thread it went good, cant wait to meet you guys in a swap!

Im gonna do a water change to my nano tomorrow morning and get things in check according to the checklist for both tanks and then just fingers crossed as well

wmo168 · Aug 30, 2019

Get a pc apc backup and run the pump

Dkeller_nc · Aug 31, 2019

It's useful to be able to calculate the length of time that batteries will run a piece of tank equipment so that you can make intelligent choices based on your estimation of how long the power's going to be out.

To do this, you simply need to be able to convert the amperage requirements from AC-based to DC-based, and how to interpret battery capacity. The first thing to realize is that power (in watts) is power, whether it's being fed from AC 120V or DC 12V. So if you have a 50 watt return pump, it will require 50 watts whether it's being fed from the wall or fed from a 12V deep-cycle battery and an inverter.

You can use that fact and the equation P=VI (power equals voltage times amperage) to calculate the amperage that your pump will draw from a 12V DC battery. In this example, 50 watts / 12V = 4.2 amps. Note that this doesn't include inverter conversion losses - a good rule of thumb for inverters is that they'll be around 90% efficient. So in this case you can expect that you'll be drawing about 4.2A/0.9 = 4.7 amps.

Batteries are rated for total power capacity in terms of "amp-hours". Note that this is not the same as the power ratings typically expressed for computer UPS units. You might see such a UPS listed as "1500 watts". That's the maximum power that you can draw from the unit, but it doesn't tell you how long the unit will last at that power draw. For marine, deep cycle batteries of "standard" automotive size, a typical amp-hour rating is about 85. The largest ones that are typically available to consumers in stores is 105 Amp-hours. To determine how long such a battery will power a device, divide the amp-hour rating by the total DC amp draw. In our example, a 50w AC pump powered through a DC inverter with 90% efficiency will last 85Ah/4.7A = 18 hours.

After doing a few of these conversions, you may find that it doesn't make a lot of sense to power a return pump, heater, skimmer, or anything else other than a powerhead or two in the main tank.

Note: The reason that an LFS would tell you that resuming operation of a sump after it's sat unpowered for several hours is because of the potential for hydrogen sulfide gas generation. This will happen due to the action of anaerobic bacteria on organic matter in a closed environment, such as a reactor. And a substantial dose of hydrogen sulfide will indeed kill everything in your tank. To be safe, if you lose power, disconnect any enclosed reactor in your sump, and clean them out before restarting them if you've lost power for more than a couple of hours.

TangoTang · Aug 31, 2019

Dkeller_nc said:
It's useful to be able to calculate the length of time that batteries will run a piece of tank equipment so that you can make intelligent choices based on your estimation of how long the power's going to be out.

To do this, you simply need to be able to convert the amperage requirements from AC-based to DC-based, and how to interpret battery capacity. The first thing to realize is that power (in watts) is power, whether it's being fed from AC 120V or DC 12V. So if you have a 50 watt return pump, it will require 50 watts whether it's being fed from the wall or fed from a 12V deep-cycle battery and an inverter.

You can use that fact and the equation P=VI (power equals voltage times amperage) to calculate the amperage that your pump will draw from a 12V DC battery. In this example, 50 watts / 12V = 4.2 amps. Note that this doesn't include inverter conversion losses - a good rule of thumb for inverters is that they'll be around 90% efficient. So in this case you can expect that you'll be drawing about 4.2A/0.9 = 4.7 amps.

Batteries are rated for total power capacity in terms of "amp-hours". Note that this is not the same as the power ratings typically expressed for computer UPS units. You might see such a UPS listed as "1500 watts". That's the maximum power that you can draw from the unit, but it doesn't tell you how long the unit will last at that power draw. For marine, deep cycle batteries of "standard" automotive size, a typical amp-hour rating is about 85. The largest ones that are typically available to consumers in stores is 105 Amp-hours. To determine how long such a battery will power a device, divide the amp-hour rating by the total DC amp draw. In our example, a 50w AC pump powered through a DC inverter with 90% efficiency will last 85Ah/4.7A = 18 hours.

After doing a few of these conversions, you may find that it doesn't make a lot of sense to power a return pump, heater, skimmer, or anything else other than a powerhead or two in the main tank.

Note: The reason that an LFS would tell you that resuming operation of a sump after it's sat unpowered for several hours is because of the potential for hydrogen sulfide gas generation. This will happen due to the action of anaerobic bacteria on organic matter in a closed environment, such as a reactor. And a substantial dose of hydrogen sulfide will indeed kill everything in your tank. To be safe, if you lose power, disconnect any enclosed reactor in your sump, and clean them out before restarting them if you've lost power for more than a couple of hours.