Charley's Angel

[Juck]

Well,,, the worst of the winds missed us in NW Orlando but there were trees down everywhere and we lost power for 24 hours starting Friday night at 8pm.

I thought I'd planned for this in advance and had battery-operated air-pumps for my 3 reef tanks but two of them failed completely after a couple of hours and the third was putting out a pathetic amount of air. I suppose that's my fault for buying cheap Azoo Air Pumps.

I spent Saturday oxygenating the tanks every hour with an egg-whisk attached to my cordless drill,, best I could come up with,, luckily I had 2 fully charged powerpacks.

The power came back up last night and the only casualty as far as I can tell was my Potter's Angel which I hadn't seen since the lights went out. I suspect it suffocated as all the other fish in that tank were gulping for air when I awoke on Saturday morning - I saw Hermit crabs finishing off what was left of his body last night. Every piece of Xenia in that tank was dead also. Thank you Azoo airpumps.

I consider myself lucky all my other corals and fish survived fine,,,, I know there are many reefers in FL that are much worse off right now.

 

[dab1]

Fortunately, here in North Palm Beach we got one feeder band early Friday morning as the system was passing over Cuba and nothing else. I spent most of Friday night doing business with my counterpart in Orlando who gave me a literal blow by blow of the winds hour by hour (2100 or 2200 was when he reported that the wind had really kicked in and it was getting bad out).

Anyway, anyone out there have an idea how quickly does a depowered system lose oxygen? I guess a better question would be is there some kind of even rough functional form one can assume to make a guess how quickly a reasonably well aerated system will lose enough oxygen to threaten the inhabitants? I can’t imagine that too many people have experimented on their nice setups to determine this answer (and I have no desire to do so on mine). Anyone else out there with even anecdotal experience on power loss and reef aquaria oxygen requirements? Not to rub salt in a wound, but there seem to be a fair number of reef aquarists in California, and 2000-2001 wasn’t that long ago…

My backup plan for my tank had been to unplug my living room UPS (which protects the home theater, but is ridiculously large for that purpose) and plug my protein skimmer (hang on the back little beastie on a 36 gallon aquarium, Via Aqua or some such) into it to aerate. On thinking about this plan now, I am beginning to think that a motor is likely to suck down battery power quickly and I would have become disappointed with this solution. Furthermore, I have rather overengineered my new setup (90 gallon display / 29 gallon sump not yet in production) and therefore neither UPS that I have would likely keep up with its demands. I have thought about getting an LP backup generator for the house, and this may be another argument in favor.