Power outage plan

[twhit030]

Okay r2r I’m back with another question trying to expand my knowledge just a little more to take that next step in this awesome hobby we have. Hope this question well help me many others and at the same time help some people revise their plans.

this week my question is on power outages. For those who haven’t ever seen my other posts I live in sunny south Florida and this past month we’ve had 2 hurricane scares along with this one currently (doubt it’s going to amount to anything but we’ll see.)

that being said obviously power outages from storms is a real concern for me especially long power outages. Our house doesn’t have a 80k dollar house generator so we use a gas powered one.

I’m assuming the main life supports are heat, nutrients (cal, alk est.), light and flow. I have everything set up on an apex
2 1k gyres
1 return
1 skimmer
3 channel t5
1 heater
1 dose pump
Wifi camera
Atk

wondering what everyone’s plans are, what’s the first thing you do, what do you do to prepare if you assume you’re going to have a power outage, what about the unknown power outages, are there any life supports that you sacrifice and do by hand to save power ex: dosing, top off?

as always thanks for the help and the input

 

[KStatefan]

Automatic battery backup on my powerheads.

Portable generator for longer power outages.

 

[Addictedreefer87]

For Irma I went without power for 3 days. I prefroze empty water bottles to float if I needed to keep the tank temp down. I also have a spare window unit ac I run off the gas generator. The only other thing I did was run 1 return pump to keep the water oxygenated. Corals can go sometime with out light. Everything survived in my 240 gal at the time and was pretty simple.

 

[twhit030]

For Irma I went without power for 3 days. I prefroze empty water bottles to float if I needed to keep the tank temp down. I also have a spare window unit ac I run off the gas generator. The only other thing I did was run 1 return pump to keep the water oxygenated. Corals can go sometime with out light. Everything survived in my 240 gal at the time and was pretty simple.

Would you say it’s better to have no light at all rather than half light? So with my t5 2 channels are 2 bulbs 1 channel is 4 bulbs I usually run all 8 (all acro tank) would it be better to just keep lights off for a few days or hit them with only 2 or 4 bulbs even tho they are use to 8 bulbs? Does that make any sense lol

 

[Shazam311]

I thought about purchasing one of these to help

 

[Shazam311]

I thought about getting one of these

 

[Addictedreefer87]

Would you say it’s better to have no light at all rather than half light? So with my t5 2 channels are 2 bulbs 1 channel is 4 bulbs I usually run all 8 (all acro tank) would it be better to just keep lights off for a few days or hit them with only 2 or 4 bulbs even tho they are use to 8 bulbs? Does that make any sense lol

I would think any light is better than no light if you had the ability to run either. I just went off the fact that thses corals are shipped in a box half way across the world and don't have lights on them for days lol mine were fine though with no light.

 

[brandon429]

I guarantee you a system with a common stored up sandbed is a bad liability during power outages

They're massive oxygen removing zones when oxygen is in shortest supply

Either rip clean your reef or remove the bed using our extraction ways if you feel stillness is imminent. Changing the tank design to store no waste to match the predicted stressor is the exact biological prep move you want, in addition to hardware preps

If I reached down into my deep sand bed and grabbed sand and dropped it, no devastating clouds result. It was recently cleaned.

Conversely, about 10% of current reef tanks if you did that, some animals could die- they're full on waste storage and by extension bacteria capitalizing on nutrients. Decide where you're at on the waste storage spectrum. If you took a rock and twisted it mid tank would a huge waste cloud come off

That's massive biological and chemical oxygen demand, a clean system is far safer and is more oxygen conservative

 

[KC's CNC Creations]

when Iven hit in 04' i lost power for 2 weeks, in my 180 the acros that were near the surface were exposed to air with the return pump off. for the first several days i kept them wet with a tea picture scooping water from the sump and pouring it over them ever so often, by the end of the second week it would be up to 8 hours between wetting them. had 1600w of MH over that tank and it ran upper 80s low 90s for temp, so heat wasn't an issue with the lights OFF, the tank actually dropped a few degree. I had zero losses during that time and it was a well over stocked system within a week of power restored everything was back to normal. in all honesty, it isn't as critical as some make it out to be if you're water quality is on par already, if you struggle with water quality with power on........it's likely 100x more critical when power drops for extended periods.