Reef nutrition

HELP!!!

Kmooresf

Supporting Member
Hey all, just woke up to the lovely sound of pump cavitation.

A couple snails crawled into the frag tank overflow last night and I have lost about 40 - 50 gallons of water all over my floor. I am wondering if anyone has some RO water ready to go in the SF, DALY CITY, Penninsula area? Thanks,

Kris.
 
I got maybe 20-25 gallons, my DI resin has expired so it's not completely 0 TDS, but the filters are only a month old so it should be free of stuff. Unfortunately I don't have anything you could use to transport it.

Coral_Reefer lives a few blocks up the hill from me, I know he has large storage containers for water, not sure if he's available now though.
 
Thanks Mike,

I managed to find 35 gallons of distilled at Safeway, plus the 10 that I had in my ATO, so I think I am ok at the moment. Mixing and heating now.

Assessed the tank, and it seems the display params are still pretty damn good. Everything looks ok so far. Just found a small troches snail wedged way deep in my drain of the frag tank. :( Bummer. It was a fear from the beginning.

Haven't started any pumps, so don't know if I burnt up any yet. I'll give an update once everything is running again.
 
oh no, that's horrible news :eek: I thought I had it bad a few mornings ago when I woke up to find 2-3 gallons of kalkwasser running across my hardwood floor int he living room. I hope you don't end up w/ any water damage from this... I do not have RO water though I hope someone will chime in & help.
If you don't find anyone I could tell you where I've found the lowest price on RO water near me (east bay) sorry I can't offer any help...
 
Damn those, the cheapest creatures we put in our tanks!!!

That said, glad you managed to get some water. I know an hour can seem like an eternity when you're frantically trying to find something you need.
 
Oh, how cute........the little guy fit perfectly. :mad:


Yay safeway!!


A lot of folks have contacted me with offers of water and help. Can't tell you how much I appreciate it. At the moment I have enought to get the system going. I may need to do a major water change, but still assessing. My heaters were smoking up the house (1500 watts). But they are Titanium tubes ran off a Ranco controller. I am going to put them in a seperate bucket to see if they broke, or anything might have come out of them. They look ok though.

1 fatality confirmed. Little linear blenny in my sump was stuck on some egg crate and dried out. :( RIP.
 
Not sure if this is useful advice but I've recently been planning an overflow for my tank and since I'm going with straight (no weir or teeth) overflow I've come up with this as a safety precaution, perhaps it might be useful to you as well?
roll-lock-gutter-guard_2.png
g
Flexible gutter guard. I'll be buying some soon if you want any :)
 
I have maggie's on my display. Prolly a good idea. Thanks Fidel. The plan has been for a while to re-do the entire frag system and replace with a 50 gallon glass one. Just saving up some cash, so I might try that in the meantime. I had this problem a while back, but caught it. Took all the larger snails out of the frag tank (so I thought) months ago. Just had a bunch of babies in there. Oh well.
 
hope your heaters are ok, but just because they're titanium doesn't mean they're all titanium. They're basically glass heaters with a titanium tube around them.
 
Bummer. Best of luck!
I have 30G RODI, plus I have a completely empty but running 60G fuge if you need emergency livestock storage.
But it sounds like you are OK, and I am way down in Union City.
 
Thanks for the offer Mark.

Things are looking good. Heaters are out and in a bucket of water. All three are working, no visable leaks or any breakage. Not sure how I would know if the glass broke, but assume they would leak or smoke? Gonna leave them running for a bit to make sure. Just glad nothing leaked into the tank. Water is mixed and almost heated, so I will be checking pumps soon. Frag overflow has been cleared and is ready to run again.

Salinity didn't change, and only about 10 gallons of ATO water was missing, so it seems this must have only been going on for a short time. Frag tank only turns about 400 gph, so it probably just got clogged this morning some time. Could have been SO MUCH WORSE!

My big concern are the primary return pumps for the tank. The frag tank water comes out of the first chamber of the sump. This caused the sump to get low. The return flows from the last chamber and was running empty for the longest of all the cavitating pumps. They were pretty hot too when I finally got them off.

Alk in the tank is still good. I run a Kalk reactor, so it only holds about 3 gallons......gets diluted pretty quick, so that is good.
 
Im ordering float switches this week to set up an auto shutoff of the return pump + alert for this kind of situation. And this is with having the return covered with gutter-guard.
 
Glad you found water at Safeway Kris. I usually have 100 gallon each of RO and saltwater in the twin towers. I have left over gutter guard and black zip ties to avoid this from happening again.
 
Sorry to hear Kris. I know we texted a bit a things are under control, glad it was easily handled without much repercussion. Good luck on the clean up, you know I am only around the corner ;)
 
Sooooooooo,

Things are starting to slow down here. My water estimate was a bit low.............added 47.5 gallons of distilled water from 3 different stores in the area, plus the 10 gallons of RO I had.........plus about another 5 gallons of RO that I made today while all this was happening. Of coarse my RO unit is running CRAZY slow today. LOL!

So apparently we had over 60 gallons of saltwater leak onto the floor. The room has a very slight slope to the corner that the spill happened in. This caused most of the water to leak through the floor at the corner of the wall, onto the garage floor. This is good, and bad. I figure it could have been worse. Because I never finished the dry wall taping, etc I was able to remove the drywall and open things up a bit to dry. I have access to both side walls where the damage was the worst and have all the insillation pulled out and high power fans blowing on the wood. I also have access to the space under the floor which is allowing me to flow air there as well. My major concern is the bamboo flooring. water was actually seeping up through the floor this morning when we walked on it. So we have fans on that as well.

I had two stacks of towels right under the frag tank, because that is where we keep them. They were absolutely saturated, so I figure that was a small help.

The salinity, alk and temps dropped. Temp was the big one..........when I finally got enough water replaced in the tank and got the Ranco plugged back in, it was reading 73'. I plugged in an extra heater that has a thermometer in it as well, and it also read 73. It has been slowly climbing for the past few hours and is now 76' on the ranco and 77 on the other. Fish all seem fine and ate well, however I assume I will have an ich issue in the next few days at the very least. Alk dropped a bit to 8.4, but is now up to 9.3 again and salinity is back to normal. It didn't drop much though.

I lost two of my biggest coral............the giant "hollywood stunner" chalice and my large Spongode Monti. They were both stuck out of the water for an unknown amount of time. Didn't have enough water to put them in buckets and it was too low in the sump. I am hoping I saved at least some of the spongode......it's now in the frag tank, but the stunner is gone. Not a big deal, as I had already removed them both from the tank for lack of room, however I was hoping to frag them and give em away.

All the other coral look OK, but I will be on RTN watch for the next week or so. They go so freakin fast once it starts. I'll be checking Calcium, Mag, phosphates in a bit, and will keep an eye on Nitrates as the rocks in the sump were exposed most of the day. The mushrooms on the rocks seem to be ok though, so I am hopeful there wasn't much die off.

All pumps seem to be ok. I had to bang on one of my primary pumps for a bit and turn it on and off several times to get it working and primed, but running strong now and isn't overheating. I also had just put a new Jaboe WP 40 in the sump to increase the flow in the refugium. Thing is a BEAST!! It was running full blast and completely out of the water for however long this thing was going on. It is running just fine, and all the functions on the wavemaker are still working. I was going to have to drain the sump to cut some larger holes in the baffle, between the first and second sump chambers, to increase the flow from the WP 40 anyway. So, I used this opportunity to get that done as well. It really helped the flow, and now the fuge is rockin and rollin with plenty of flow. Chaeto seems to have survived as well. It was high and dry when I got up, but threw it in the last couple inches of water and it seems like it is gonna pull through.

Other than all the noise from the fans, things here are much calmer. I NEED A DRINK!!

Thanks to everyone for being willing and ready to help if needed. I really appreciate it.
 
Back
Top