ZoWhat
7500 Club Member
You're unprepared.... snowstorm has led to being caught with your pants down.
Your Power is O U T until ???
REDNECK GUIDE TO UNPREPAREDNESS WHEN YOU'VE REACHED ROCK-BOTTOM
Critical Step 1: WATER TEMPERATURE
With no power, no generator, nothing, zippo to power your tank heaters.... you need to keep your tank at minimum in the low-70s to minimize your losses
First off, hopefully you have some sort of empty 2liter bottles around. Best if you have empty milk jugs. Any plastic containers with screw-on caps will work... hopefully a whole bunch of them.
Second off, hopefully you have a large cooking pot.
Third, hopefully you have some sort of fireplace, firepit, somewhere to safely start a fire.
Since the goal here is to keep the tank's temp in the 70s.... youre going to have to:
* boil TAP WATER in a cooking pot over a fire
* take the hot water and bottle it in 2liters or milk jugs
* you're going to have to FLOAT the hot bottles/jugs in your tank
* hopefully you have a glass Thermometer to monitor the temp manually. If not, you're going to have to use the feel-of-your-hand to guess whats btwn 70-80°
* you're going to have to setup a system of ROTATING bottles/jugs of hot water every couple of hours.
Will you lose sleep? heck yeah you will. But do you want to lose everything or get restful sleep?
Critical Step 2: WATER MOVEMENT
No way around it. If you are truly without power of any form, you will need to manually move the water to evenly keep Temps thruout the tank... and...OXYGENATE the tank water
Two ways to move water:
1) manually swoosh it, and/or,
2) fill up a container with the tank water by submerging the container and immediately POURING it back in tank moving the tank water
Critical you OXYGENATE the water by swooshing the waterline to introduce air bubbles into the water... or if you are pouring, pour heavy so that air is mixing with your pour.
Best thing to use to manually swoosh the water? Smthg flat, about 4-6ins wide, and stiff. Possibly a piece of CLEAN wood or plastic.... whatever resembles a paddle
Best thing to pour back in the tank? An empty gallon milk jug that you can control the pour.
You get the idea...
Again,you're going to have to suck it up and get 5mins of water movement ever 2hrs hours.
Dont be surprised your fish staying close to your floating heated water bottles/jugs as they cast-off heat
Critical Step 3: FISH FEEDING
Feeding your fish is NOT a critical concern right now.
Any food is just going to POLLUTE the tank.
Fish can go days without food. I wouldnt even start to be concerned with feeding your fish until day-5 without power
Again, the fish will know its Survival-of-the-Fittest time and probably won't eat much any way. You putting food in is just going to ramp up the Ammonia Cycle and kill your fish and coral.
Critical Step 4: GETTING BACK ON THE GRID
Once power return, DO NOT jump back into things-as-normal.
Sudden temp changes will bring on illness and disease
Sudden overfeedings will pollute your water
Once power is available MOVE SLOOOOOW to ramp things back to normal
Slow, slow, slowly changes things back to normal including temps, lighting, feedings.
Sidenote on lighting.... depending on how many hours or days you were without power..... BEST to ramp back your lighting schedule to 4-6hrs of Actnic Blue light ONLY for a few days and slowly reintroduce longer periods of light and bringing white light back up slowly.
Good luck!
Hope this helps someone from losing everything!
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