Hi all - not sure how many of you actually heard of my tank wipe-out in the beginning of this year (January 2007).
Went away on holiday in December, on a SCUBA diving trip where we drove (because of all the SCUBA kit) firstly to KZN South Coast (Port Shepstone/Margate) for a few days. Then drove to Sodwana for a few days, then after that to Pretoria.
We would just have slept over in Pretoria, but then right then, one of my wife's younger aunts were killed in a car accident. So we had to stay longer for the funeral.
In the meanwhile, we have asked that someone look after the house and the aquarium (feeding the fish).....
What happened? There were 2 power-outages in the 3 weeks we were aways for, where the 1st power outage caused the sump to overflow, which caused flooding all over the plugs/leads supplying electricity to the tank... This caused that the electricity trip when the power came back on.
By the time we found out about the first power outage, which was 3 days later, we already lost out Yellow Tang, Bicolor angel, anemone, rose-lobed leather coral....
BUT, if this was not bad enough, the auto-topup system kept on dripping fresh RO water into the tank. So when the electricity was restored (we called someone else to assist with "cleaning up" and getting the electricity restored), there was already a considerable amount of fresh water in the tank, and the SG has already dropped somewhat.
Now, here comes the "killer" - a second power-outage occurred (all this while we were away) JUST before we were about to return home.
EXACTLY the same story - this time, we lost ALL the invertebrate life in the tank, with the water flooding the sump, the auto-topup system replenished the lost salt water, with fresh RO water, when the electricity was restored.
We came back home to a aquarium without ANY invertebrate life (except for ONE SINGLE APTAISIA - whish survived ALL of this - can you believe it), and all my hermit crabs - they all survived as well..... I was amazed at this.
I had 9 fish in total at that stage - we list 4 of the 9 fish. My first Mandarin also survived, but only for a very short while afterwards. Without ANY pods in the tank, my poor mandarin also died. BUT the funniest thing was it was completely bloated with the fresh water it took up (you could see funny looking "bubbles" under it's skin due to the fresh water).
Moral of the story - ENSURE that you have some plans for power outages, keep the plugs FAR FAR away for where they could get wet, and ensure that you do NOT have a auto-topup system on at that time, OR set the auto-topup to supply FAR less water, and ENSURE that you do not have TOO much water in your tank, that your sump overflows.....
I was left with a tank devoid of ANY corals or any other invertebrate life for that matter, and far less fish than I hoped for.
Otherwise the trip to Sodwana was quite good - got some very nice diving in