Need advice! Almost burnt my house down

[KimberlyMary]

So, I’m new to the hobby. I have a 60 gallon saltwater tank with two clowns, some snails and a cleaner shrimp. When I started I didn’t think I could have a sump where my tank isn’t drillable so I got a canister filter and HOB skimmer. When I was setting up I made sure to have a drip loop on all my cables and that my outlet was gfci..

Well, today we went to Walmart to return to a puddle in the floor and the light strip plugin completely blown. Turns out my protein skimmer overflowed majorly and managed to make it’s way near the outlet.

For some extra detail.. which can be skipped... I went with a ReefOctopus HoB classic-100 skimmer which once started was only fizzing a little, nothing in the collection cup. Figured it could be a break in period problem so I left it alone but it has been running for two months with no real foam so I did some research and seen someone suggest removing the silencer on the air intake to bring in more air to help get it started since the only adjustable thing is the height of the collection cup which would just fill with water when I lowered it to the fizz.. so I did that.. which seemed to help create a little more fizz. At this point I only had snails and a shrimp in the main tank and had clowns in a QT. I just transferred them yesterday so I dosed the tank with StressGuard thinking it would help.. also because they are currently picking on one another so there’s a little fin damage.. I thought surely it would help them heal.. I’m guessing it did something to my skimmer and it overflowed. This wouldn’t have been such a big issue but my outlet is about center behind my tank.. over a bit from my skimmer but somehow the overflow got close enough to hit it. I had everything connected to a power bar that’s mounted higher behind the tank except for my light bar which was plugged into an Alexa compatible outlet (using as a timer) that plugs into the regular outlet. The regular outlet seems to have not been touched by the water but the Alexa plugin has blown up and also blew the plug off my light. We were lucky to not have had anything worse happen!

In the end, my plea for help is to see if anyone can advise me on turning my 60 gallon into a system with a sump. I would feel safer having all my equipment at a lower level than the outlets if possible. It would be VERY helpful if someone could point me towards the right products and specifics for those products (eg. gph, media type, etc).

Also, as it will take me time to collect items as I’m in a very rural area, if anyone could help advise me on using this HOB Skimmer properly, that would be amazing.

 

[JumboShrimp]

I’ll just say in general that skimmers should be adjusted very minutely. Meaning if there is an adjustment wheel to turn, maybe less than a 1/4 turn at a time to fine-tune things. If you are not getting much in your collection cup and figure, ‘I’ll give this knob a good crank and walk away,’ you can easily come back a few hours later to a huge skimmer overflow. (Hope this helps.)

 

[Cell]

Swap your HOB skimmer for a Tunze 9004 and drop it in the tank. Not quite as clean looking, but at least you won't burn your house down.

 

[Plecosam]

Bro calm down, not even close to burning your house down. It's like your underpants, if no brown you are good. Do you have breakers or fuses and are your circuits RCD protected.