G2-B
Aquarium Advice Regular
Yesterday, I planned on getting gasoline for the generator, because I expected power outages with the coming cold snap. It got postponed, and as such things go, the power outage happened last night, for some 4 hours.
This was the 1st power outage since I started with aquariums again. Panic of course, although probably somewhat prematurely. I had 2 'baby bubbles' air pumps that I bought for transporting the convict cichlids and 2 1500VA UPS battery backups for the computers. I used the UPS backup batteries to directly power the air pumps of 2 tanks and the baby bubbles in 2 other tanks. That got us through the night without any loss of life.
This morning I went to get gasoline and tried to get the generator started. That was a bust. This Coleman had not been used in at least 5 years, if not more, and the gasoline was leaking out of the bottom of the fuel tank. Good thing I didn't fill it up all the way.
I'll have to get this cleaned up and repaired. It's probably not a good idea to try running this when it is sitting in a puddle of gasoline.
Then comes the smaller generator to the rescue. I had bought this one for charging/running a computer while camping. This one at least started up without any problem, although I had to figure out which buttons to push in what sequence before it would start. It runs considerably quieter than the big one.
2,000 W should be enough to keep the aquarium heaters and air pumps going overnight. Hopefully I'll never need it longer than that, because our heater is electric too, and that won't run on this small generator.
Of course, what we experience here in Southern NM is nothing compared to what people up North and East are going through, much colder and potentially outages for days on end.
How do you prepare for power outages?
This was the 1st power outage since I started with aquariums again. Panic of course, although probably somewhat prematurely. I had 2 'baby bubbles' air pumps that I bought for transporting the convict cichlids and 2 1500VA UPS battery backups for the computers. I used the UPS backup batteries to directly power the air pumps of 2 tanks and the baby bubbles in 2 other tanks. That got us through the night without any loss of life.
This morning I went to get gasoline and tried to get the generator started. That was a bust. This Coleman had not been used in at least 5 years, if not more, and the gasoline was leaking out of the bottom of the fuel tank. Good thing I didn't fill it up all the way.
I'll have to get this cleaned up and repaired. It's probably not a good idea to try running this when it is sitting in a puddle of gasoline.
Then comes the smaller generator to the rescue. I had bought this one for charging/running a computer while camping. This one at least started up without any problem, although I had to figure out which buttons to push in what sequence before it would start. It runs considerably quieter than the big one.
2,000 W should be enough to keep the aquarium heaters and air pumps going overnight. Hopefully I'll never need it longer than that, because our heater is electric too, and that won't run on this small generator.
Of course, what we experience here in Southern NM is nothing compared to what people up North and East are going through, much colder and potentially outages for days on end.
How do you prepare for power outages?
