So IT happened while you were out of town....NO!!!!!!

[jfree07]

My wife can a fill the top off chamber and feed flake. Pretty simple.

 

[ca1ore]

A couple of people have noted it, but bears repeating: never make substantial changes to your tank ahead of a vacation. In fact, I don’t make ANY changes. You’re just inviting trouble.

 

[sawdonkey]

I’ve left town for up to ten days with little worry. My biggest worry is that my ATO sensor screws up, so I put a web cam on it.

I put a auto feeder on the tank and also have a neighbor feed nori and frozen ever third day or so.

I have an experienced reefer buddy that lives close by, so if my apex or web cam tells me something, he goes over to check on things. I have internet based locks on my house, so I just send him a temporary code to get in.

Other than that, if taking a long trip, I swap out my 25 gallon ATO tank for a 45 gallon Brute.

Skim locker handles skimmer for quite a while.

 

[KrisReef]

I do emergency response and clean-up management as my day job. I have learned that what you can plan for you should. Knowing that you can't plan for everything can also be helpful for understanding and managing expectations. Specifically, If for some reason the electrical power & ( cell phone service )is cut to my home for 3 days or longer it doesn't matter if I am home or away, the tank is going to be in deep distress and everything in it will likely be lost in that situation. Fires, hurricanes, earthquakes are incidents that can make aquarium plans moot, so for my tank I don't plan for these kinds of situations because my families life safety is going to need all my attention first in those circumstances.
I do plan for minor disasters with the tank because these things happen fairly regularly and being prepared is very important. (I need to label my cords, thanks to an earlier poster for that tip!)

1. How do you know when something is going wrong?
I try to keep my tank working properly so that the inhabitants are in good shape if something goes wrong. Having a clean display tank and good water quality reduces the tanks normal oxygen demand, making power outages or circulation pump failures more survivable. If I am not home, my wife or friends keep an eye out, but other than that I am not going to know if there is a problem.

2. Is there someone who you trust to handle the situation?
Louis from Reefer's Garage has got my back during emergency situations. I owe him one for a recent situation.

3. Do you have a plan in place or a way to be able to walk someone through the issues that are taking place?
Nope, just a cell phone and a prayer.

4. Whats the worse thing you have ever had happen while you were away?
My acrylic tank has been set up for 4 years, 105 gallons DT in line with a sump and a separate refugium tank that the water circulates through. The overflow box from the DT separated at a "bonded" seam and started leaking. My wife called me in a panic, (so as others noted, I was 600 miles away from home, suited up in Tyvex to do an inspection when I took her call from the 'warm zone') screaming at me that the tank was leaking and the waterproof tape she had purchased to fix the leak didn't work! I wondered why she had not called when she discovered the leak, and while she was talking with me I could hear the sump pump starting to cavitate as the water still emptied from the system onto the garage floor. (The tank in the garage is part of my emergency prepartion. )
I told her to top off the tank from my bucket of prepared reef water and called Louis who left his store to come patch the system. He rigged one of my supply pump lines to flow backwards and serve as an emergency overflow return to the sump. The system ran on half flow until I got a break in work and came home to repair the overflow.

(I didn't lose anything except a little sleep, and I learned that denatured alcohol is a perfectly safe cleaner for removing waterproof tape glue from off of acrylic.)

 

[vlangel]

I have 2 tanks and 1 is a seahorse tank. Seahorses present a special challenge to going away.

1. How do you know when something is going wrong? Because seahorses must eat multiple Xs every day, I need to have someone come every day. In case of a power outage that potentially could happen an hour after the tanks were tended, I have auto battery backup pumps for aeration.

2. Is there someone who you trust to handle the situation? My sister is my tank caregiver. She has had saltwater and would recognise most problems.

3. Do you have a plan in place or a way to be able to walk someone through the issues that are taking place? I always have a brute can of grenade saltwater. Most of my equipment cords are labelled. My sister is very good at understanding mechanical things so I believe I could talk her through just about any issue.

4. Whats the worse thing you have ever had happen while you were away? I had a neighbor's daughter take care of the seahorse tank. She had too much mysis get wasted and the skimmer went crazy thus having the skimmer cup overflow into my overflow container. Unfortunately the ato malfunctioned and did not replenish the overflow water and evaporated water in the basement sump so the sump ran dry enough that it wasn't pumping much water up, just air. A lot ot the macro algaes in the fuge portion of the sump died further polluting a system that was compromised filtration wise. With the conditions not being optimal 1 of my 3 seahorses became sick and died as a result. It could have been much worse so I was grateful that it was not.

 

[ZoWhat]

All I know is when I DIE my spouse will have my tank listed in the FREE STUFF section of Craigslist within 6hrs of my death.




.

 

[Jay Z]

I get about 8 days max for self running, after that I need someone to fill my water containers. Besides that my nest cam and apex keep me up to date.

Any fatal issues come up, its a reboot after that.

 

[Philipgonzales3]

It just occurred to me that vacations are harder because of my tank

My plans only in my head at this point. But shh! My tank is only a few months old. Let me enjoy it you buzzkill! JKJK. Guess I'll worry about it when I can afford a vacation! Lol.

 

[cracker]

I have 2 neighbors that help me with simple tasks. One comes late morn to just feed then in the late afternoon. Another comes by to dose & feed again. Yhis good friend knows about the ato & such,how to make water if necessary. Basic simple stuff to keep the finned kids happy while I'm away.

 

[Dancingmad]

My plan is the same as what to do in a double parachute failure -

 

[slowngreen]

I basically just keep "panic on site" as my main option. I don't really ever leave home for more than a day or two. The only thing I have is a diy fail safe for my doser and I have a generator incase of power outages while I'm home, which has been a life savor twice now.

 

[ks2509]

I have purposefully kept this tank as simple as possible for when we travel. Being military I am gone and my wife dosent want a huge hastle with it. This is a blessing for vacation I just pay one of the guys at work who lives in the barracks a case or 2 of beer and give them a place to sleep for a few days. They watch the dog and cat and tank. Show them how to and how much to feed and make sure the ato is full. If they have any issues I keep my phone on me.

 

[Bob Weigant]

I hit the no plan in place. Whenever I leave I have the LFS come by daily or my step daughters will watch things. If it was something like an earthquake or shattered tank glass not much I could do out side of having them put in another reef tank I have

 

[jfree07]

My wife can feed and add ro water to the reservoir.

 

[SuncrestReef]

1. How do you know when something is going wrong? I have my Apex set to alert me on several conditions for my Reefer XL 425:

• Water leak inside or below cabinet
• Temperature too low or too high
• Salinity too low or too high
• pH too low or too high
• Sump water level too low or too high
• Refugium water level too high
• Skimmer locker full
• 75 gallon RO/DI storage tank too low or too full
• 75 gallon saltwater storage tank too low
• Power failure

2. Is there someone who you trust to handle the situation? A friend who house sits/dog sits and has been trained on the basics of my tank. If there's anything she can't handle, then she contacts my LFS for assistance. I'm also in talks with a couple of other local reefers to arrange trading tank sitting duties.

3. Do you have a plan in place or a way to be able to walk someone through the issues that are taking place? I wrote up a fairly detailed user manual for my system. It covers all the basics of feeding, filter sock replacement, emptying the skimmer locker, how to log into Apex Fusion, and what common things to watch for. I created a troubleshooting guide that lists each possible Apex alert and how to address them, and I also recorded several YouTube videos for common maintenance tasks. Lastly, I have my Apex and Internet router on a UPS battery for short power outages, and then my whole house is on a 22kW generator fueled by natural gas that automatically starts up if the power has been off for more than 1 minute.

4. Whats the worse thing you have ever had happen while you were away? Over the Christmas holiday my tank suffered a brown jelly outbreak which killed about 15 frags. My tank sitter described how things looked and sent me photos, but I couldn't really figure out what the problem was until I got home and looked at some samples under my microscope to confirm brown jelly.

 

[PaulPerger]

First let me say, I am just now building my first SW tank, and my answers below reflect what I plan to do, and in fact WILL do before I introduce any livestock to my tanks. I have a lot of experience with FW tanks, for which I had no plan in place and the answer to number 4 is exactly why I won't make that mistake again.

1. How do you know when something is going wrong? What do you have in place that would tell you something is not right?
I have purchased an Apex primarily for monitoring purposes. It will be my controller for a few things, but not everything, but as of right now it is my monitoring system for when I am away.

2. Is there someone who you trust to handle the situation? A friend in the hobby, neighbor or family member?
I have recently identified several people in my neighborhood who have tanks and I plan to network with them and make agreements to help eachother out when out of town. I will be diagramming my sump, labeling everything, and making a ToDo list of the daily/weekly maintenance items. I plan to label every ball valve, etc, so the instructions will be as simple as "Turn ball valve B to this position..."

3. Do you have a plan in place or a way to be able to walk someone through the issues that are taking place?
I have a cell phone, but my plan is to make a plan that can be executed without my input. Generally, when I am away on vacation, I am somewhere where I can't be reached. I don't take my laptop or tablet on vacation. A vacation in my book is a break from everything, especially technology.

4. Whats the worse thing you have ever had happen while you were away?
14 months ago on January 26th, 2018, I had 7 FW tanks with fish and one tank with snails (breeding to feed my puffers). On Jan. 26th I was perfectly healthy when I went to work. By the end of the day, I felt horrible. Saturday, the 27th I had the FLU. On Sunday the 28th I had severe chest pains and was rushed to the hospital with, it turns out, severe pneumonia. The following day, Monday the 29th I had MRRSA and by Tuesday morning, it went septic (my blood became infected).

The decision was made to put me in a Medically induced coma and flood my body with antibiotics. Three weeks later, I finally woke up, having beat the MRRSA. However, one does not wake up from a coma and then go home after being on life support systems for three weeks... Hollywood lies about that all the time! I spent another 5 weeks in the hospital being weaned off of life support and enduring Physical Therapy to regain my strength so I could go back to life as usual.

Here's the thing. I was perfectly healthy, we had NO reason whatsoever to believe this would happen to me. I had no reason to think that I may suddenly be gone and unable to communicate for over a month. With no plan in place my family did the best they could, but they had no idea what to do.

The first to die were my puffers, as nobody knew to pluck out a few snails from the snail tank each week and toss them in for the puffers. They wouldn't eat the flakes that were being put into their tanks.

Long story short, by the time I came home well over 100 fish were dead and only three tanks had life in them, and one of those was so bad, I lost those fish within a week.

Bottom Line. Terrible things can happen with absolutely NO notice. Make a plan.

 

[themcnertney]

I'm leaving for Arizona for a week. Thankfully I have a buddy who knows my tank very well and takes care of it when traveling. However, it never fails that something always goes wrong while gone. Most situations allow me to just relax and worry about what can be done in the short term and address any long term issues when I return.

 

[bigdrew]

I have no plan! (Perhaps that's not good). But, I do have this setup to attempt to keep things roughly running while gone:



I calculated that I lose roughly 16 ounces of water per day. Multiplied by 8 days, that is 128 ounces or 1 gallon. On 67 gallons of net water, that results in an increase from 1.023 ppt salt level to 1.041, assuming no water top off. I think I figured out how to hook up an ATO, but the issue is that the ATO was delayed shipping...so a bucket it is!

Here is my "out of town" setup:

1) 1 Eheim auto feeder. Set to feed twice a day. Medium sized pellets.
2) 1 battery controlled "bubbler." If the power to the outlet fails, that fires a relay inside the device that closes the "loop" and enables the batteries to turn on the air stone.
3) The ATO DIY kit from BRS (~$45) and a Tom's pump purchased from Walmart ($25) and a Homedepot bucket. Used my aquarium "veggie" feeding clip to keep the buoyant airline at the bottom of the bucket. If the pump decides to somehow run continuously there is only about 3 or 4 gallons in the bucket, but the sump has space for about 5.5 gallons of additional water. Knock on wood, I won't have an issue!

Here are some pictures:

 

[Jon Fishman]

I spend all of my money on my tank so I can’t afford to travel anywhere further than work.....