labnjab
01-15-2010, 11:31 AM
We woke up this morning to the sound of our return pump running dry. Luckily it was the time we usually get up. I checked out the reef and sure enough it overflowed. Something plugged up the standpipe. So I unplug the pump and start fooling around with the stand pipe. Turns out a astrea crawled into it and got jammed in the street elbow. Then I'm thinking great I'll never get it out. After a few minutes I stuck a stick down the air hole in the top and I managed to get the snail down into the sump. Usually I wouldn't have a flood. My return pump chamber runs dry before overflowing the tank...but I just topped off our auto topoff bucket last night so it overflowed a few gallons. Do they make a snail guard to put on the standpipe? I really don't want this happening again, but this shows how good of a pump the magdrive is because it must have been dry for several minutes
Luckily it only dropped the SG from 1.025 down to 1.024 and no live stock looks stressed. I think what prevented a bigger disaster is that we only keep 2 gallons max in our autotop off bucket unless where away for a long time . It it was full then 5 gallons of RO would have been dumped in the tank and that wouldn't have been so good :o This morning I put some saltwater in the top off bucket so I can slowly start bringing the SG back up to where it should be
Our temperature controller is also reading wrong. It always ready low so we just adjusted accordingly, now its reading high. It says the tanks at 86 when its only 80. Since the heaters have built in thermometers that are pretty much set at 80ish I just adjusted the controller to turn on where its reading now. If it decides to go back to normal the heaters will only run when its below 80 so the tank won't get cooked. I'll be so glad when we get our reefkeeper controller, lol
Luckily it only dropped the SG from 1.025 down to 1.024 and no live stock looks stressed. I think what prevented a bigger disaster is that we only keep 2 gallons max in our autotop off bucket unless where away for a long time . It it was full then 5 gallons of RO would have been dumped in the tank and that wouldn't have been so good :o This morning I put some saltwater in the top off bucket so I can slowly start bringing the SG back up to where it should be
Our temperature controller is also reading wrong. It always ready low so we just adjusted accordingly, now its reading high. It says the tanks at 86 when its only 80. Since the heaters have built in thermometers that are pretty much set at 80ish I just adjusted the controller to turn on where its reading now. If it decides to go back to normal the heaters will only run when its below 80 so the tank won't get cooked. I'll be so glad when we get our reefkeeper controller, lol