Disaster - No Power - What now?

[daveNandi]

OK, so the wife and I got a tank with LR, cycled it, and added a cleaner crew. The tank's been running with cleaner crew fine for a week before we leave for a five day weekend in Jamaica. When we came back, the Ground Fault Interrupt had gone off, so nothing was running. Tank temp was 64 (room temp) and J tube had lost siphon so it'd been out a while.

At least 2 of the snails are dead and 1 alive. I think some hermits are dead, but am not sure - at least 4 survived. Amonia, Nitrate and Nitrite all at acceptable levels.

1) What should I do to find/fix the cause of the GFCI going off.

2) Do I replace or augment the LR? Some of the stuff on it must ahve died?

3) Do I add to the cleaner crew. How do I find and count all of the survivors?

Thanks,
David

 

[dralarms]

First i would move it to a plug that wasn't ground fault. I have found they sometimes trip just because a storm come through. I would just get everything running again and get it back up to temp and wait for a few days before I did anything drastic.

 

[jackdp]

What's the tank setup? What is plugged into the GFCI? I wouldn't move everything from the GFCI to a straight plug just because if something is faulty you could kill yourself. Unplug everything from the GFCI and then reset it. Plug things in one by one until everything is powered up. This way if there is a faulty appliance you will know when the GFI trips. If everything comes on fine and the breaker holds then you may just have had a finicky GFI breaker.
If the temp only fell to 64 and the ammonia and nitrite levels are normal then there was probably minimal die off on the LR. I would address the GFCI problem and get the system running again, monitor levels for few days and go from there.
If you have many crabs or hermits in your cleanup crew then chances are that whatever died was eaten anyways. Hermits will eat just about anything they find.

 

[daveNandi]

Between cycling and everyting it ran fine for a couple of weeks. Since we reset the GFCI on Tuesday (it's now Saturday) it has continued running fine. I'm pretty convinced that there are fewer PODS - I used to see them, now I don't.

David

 

[fishfreek]

Acutally i would leave it on the ground fault. It tripping could also have been as a result of a short someplace and comming home to just a unpowered tank would have been a good thing vs possibly an electrical fire or worse.

Once you get things back up and running slowly increase the tank temperature over the course of at least 24 hours. I know your going to want to get that water temp up quick but remember it cooled down slowly and who knows how long its been at that temp. We want to be as least stressful as possible in getting the water back up to temperature.

Monitor the ammonia levels after all the pumps have been on for a bit. If you have any canister filters take the water out of them and put fresh saltwater in them before startup as the stagnent water can be fairly foul. If this is a new setup that might not be an issue. Watch for things to start to move around again once the water levels start getting in the mid 70's. Things that dont respond to a light nudging you will want to pull from the tank to prevent fouling.

Take a look at night with a flashlight for pods. They should rebound.