- Location
- Albany, NY
Most anyone that has had a reef aquarium for any length of time knows that even the best of equipment fails. This is why many reefers try to create redundant or backup systems for their major components and clearly I am no exception. That said, last Saturday the compressor on my central AC went out, so have been without AC since (company is coming on Tuesday of this week to fix it I hope). All went well for the first couple of days as the outside air temperature stayed in low 80's. Even with central AC i maintain a small chiller from my previous systems as a backup and started running the chiller immediately to maintain temperature. By Tuesday of last week, the temp in the tank had risen to 82 which is the top end of my comfort level, but appeared to be holding constant. Wednesday morning woke up to alarms going off on the big tank as temp was 84 and a number of my peppermint shrimp had been baked. I immediately checked the chiller which during the night had also failed. After a few frantic calls I was able to find 2 portable AC units with 14,000 BTU and immediately went out and got them. Now my dining room looks like a mechanical room, with 2 portable AC units rolled up near the tank, with 10" duct work running out thru the sun room and out the windows. This arrangement has stabilized the temp again at 79 (temp was slowly lowered, if for no other reason then it took a while to cool off 700 gallons of water). I was also able to get the chiller fixed so it helped out as well. Now if the repair folks can fix the central AC, life will be good. None of the corals has showed signs of stress which is good. Sometimes even having back-up systems is not enough.
