ear-fung.us I’m a programmer. I’m also pro-grammar.

Almost Burnt My House to a Crisp

OK, maybe I'm being a little melodramatic, but I got a call from my wife about 1:20 this afternoon saying that the fish tank was completely shut off. Nothing was going... no pumps, no light, no protein skimmer... NOTHING!

Naturally, I freaked out and drove home as fast carefully as possible. I went in and assessed the situation and determined that the breaker must have been tripped by something. They're building a new house about 3 doors down so maybe they interrupted the power connection for a minute and when everything tried to come on at the same time it overloaded the breaker. Yeah... maybe that's what happened.

So I go into the garage and trip the breaker and watch the fish tank come back to life. We determined it had only been off for less than 1.5 hrs so the corals should be all right.

Then I head back to work.

I sit down and unlock my workstation only to receive another phone call from my wife, "It happened again. And there's a big cloud of foul smelling smoke coming out from under the fish tank!"

"Unplug EVERYTHING," I said, and again, I rushed home.

It didn't take long to see what happened. The light on the heater was flickering on and off rapidly (indicative of a short). So I unplugged the heater and proceeded to remove it from the sump. Much to my surprise, the heater fell into two pieces as I attempted to remove it.

What a freakin' close call! I'm glad the thing was under water or it'd probably burned my house down!

All my corals seem to be doing OK except the frogspawn which looks a bit "deflated" at the moment. Hopefully he'll perk back up. The fish all seem fine except my Tomini Tang who has a few white spots on him, presumably from knocking into things while he was freaking out (he's really skittish).

Wanna see?

I'm glad it was a clean break or I'd had to get the glass shards out of my sump. There were, however, bits and pieces of carbon on the bottom of the tank that I got out with a turkey baster.

I just finished doing a ±15% water change.