no power Electricity

So the power just went out in my area and I'm wondering how long can fish corals shrimps etc be ok with out heater pupms skimmer ? I'm kinda worry

You could take a cup of water and scoop the top of your tank water and poor it back in that should be better than nothing

but really watch your fish breathing.... if they start breathing heavy churn more water... if they look fine though you should be ok for a couple hours

Nick801 wrote: You could take a cup of water and scoop the top of your tank water and poor it back in that should be better than nothing but really watch your fish breathing.... if they start breathing heavy churn more water... if they look fine though you should be ok for a couple hours

Ok thanks nick

We went 9 days without power...it can be done. We used a cordless drill and attached an egg beater and rubberized bicycle hook to it to stir the tank. We also used the battery powered airstones. We decided to ensure we would never have another power outage by buying a generator.

Good to hear that power was restored after ~2 hours. I assume there was no loss?

As the water cools, it holds more O2.
As water cools, metabolism slows so the animals need less O2.
Reduced flow slows the delivery of O2, export of CO2 and waste away from coral.
Coral and fish can usually survive many hours of reduced flow.
Coral and fish can survive temperatures of 65 and sometimes lower for extended periods.

The way I see it, during extended power outages, it's okay to let the water cool but try to keep it moving a little. As usual, water movement is more important, even critical for SPS coral, so having a powerhead or air bubbler on a battery can save lives.

Another solution would be to drop the water level around the SPS so they can shed some waste and get some air like they would when exposed during low tide. Coral are genetically programmed to slime as a protection from drying out during low tide. A little splashing water helps during low tide.

Of course this happened after sundown, but during the day:
Algae in the system produces O2, so moving algae from the Refugium to display can help a lot.
Even in faint indirect sunlight algae produces some O2.

Aloha,
Mark


Edited by Mark Peterson - January 31 2014 at 10:12pm

Another thing you can do.... Invest in a small solar panel that will charge a small battery to use a power inverter on which will run a small koralia for several hours considering they only require a few watts to run.

The Macro algae in your refugium produces oxygen for the inhabitants of the sump. Light might be more important to your sump than water movement.

Before I invested in back up equipment, I would do everything by hand. I would always open up the window near the tank just a bit to get fresh air into the room, no matter the season. I would use a turkey baster to shoot air into the water of the display and refugium in 3 to 5 minute increments. I would use just a standard thermometer to check the water temperature every half an hour. When it needed to be heated, I would take out a gallon of water at a time and heat it on the stove until it was about 85 degrees. I would keep heating the water until the system's temperature was about 80 degrees. Luckily I have never had the power go out for more than 10 hours. Turkey basting the water and driving as much air into different parts of the tank and heating the water on the stove, I've never lost a fish or coral due to the power being out.