Check your center braces!

[newfound77951]

Yesterday I had a center brace failure on my 55g. The tank is relatively old (I bought it used 3 yrs ago) and has had intense lighting (2x96 watts PC) for 4-5 years that I know of. I did a water change and upon filling the tank back up the brace started breaking as I watched. I decided to drain the tank and move the fish to another tank temporarily, today I got a new 55 and everyone is back "home" after a lot of work. I'm sure most folks don't think to actually look at the braces on their tanks....certainly can't hurt to check them closely when you do a water change, particularly with an older tank or a tank with strong lighting. I was lucky that I heard the plastic snapping, had I not the outcome could have been much worse.

[divedeep1689]

can you not just replace or repair that center brace if it did that? seems to me it would be cheeper to go that way unless you just wanted a new tank or a extra tank in the long run.

[Zagz]

Thank goodness you heard it and were able to avoid disaster! Glad everything turned out ok for you and your fishes.

[newfound77951]

They can be repaired or replaced, but I wasn't going to wait and see if the tank held in the meantime. In my case the tank was very scratched so it was worth replacing it.

I guess another good thing to keep in mind is that it is very helpful to have an extra tank around that is at least a reasonable fraction of the size of your biggest tank, in case you need to move everything out on short notice. If I didn't have that 30g, all those fish would have had to go in the 36 corner, which would have made for some serious overcrowding, and I would have had to rip that tank apart to get everyone back out, too.