Dewman

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Ok, I had a bit of an accident yesterday.
First off:
75 gallon
sps and softies + fish
29 gallon sump

I woke up yesterday morning to find that my Dolphin 1200 return pump had stopped during the night and allowed the level in my sump to rise.
This would not have normally been a big deal, except that I had moved my skimmer box down a little in the tank and forgot to readjust it the day before. So water rose above the top of my bulkheads and totally immersed an extra hang-on heater I had temporarily attached to the side of the bulkhead to get me through a rather cold night.(careless I know) My ebo-jager was on the fritz and I had to do something.
So, needless to say, it shorted out the heater and broke , allowing whatever was in my heater to contact the water. This in turn, tripped the breaker on my strips.

Now, here's the bad part. I reset the breaker on my power strips and got my pump working again. The tank had been without flowing water for about 8 hours. I reinstalled the pump in the sump and turned it on.
I never even thought about what was flowing into my tank out of my sump. My liquid alk/Calcium doser had also spilled into the sump.
All of that mixed with the 75 gallons in the tank.

Well, I jumped in the shower to get ready for work and when I got out, i found my heater in the bottom of the sump. My tank was like milk. I freaked out and did an immediate 25% water change and hooked up the Fluval with carbon/heavy metal remover mix, and threw two pieces of poly filter into the holder and ran that all day.
Well, today when I came home, the tank looked fairly normal.
Except, my SPS corals are still not showing any polyp extension.
All of my parameters are fine right now, except Calcium os a little low, but Alk is just about normal.

Is it possible I have killed them? Do SPS corals (monti's and Acro's) react like this to stress, only to come back later?

Sorry so long :( Any help would be appreciated.
 
A

Anonymous

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Ok, I had a bit of an accident yesterday

I would hate to see what you call a real emergency! :wink:

Sounds like you have taken pretty good measures to overcome your problem. It's good that everyting looks good.

You may lose something later due the ph flutuation that probably occured because of your calcium/alk spill. Only time will tell on this though.

Keep us posted!

Louey
 

newkie

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Wow, bad luck! Yes, its not uncommon for them to close up for even a few days. Sps can react to stress in many ways, the worst of which is RTN. If you see tissue sloughing off you will want to frag the piece at least .5" away from the infection. I know its hard to loose .5" of live tissue, but its usually as good as gone and the main thing is to make healthy frags that can regrow.

Anyhow, you might do another water change. But it sounds like you did everything right. Good luck!
 

Dewman

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:wink:

Thanks Guys. I have left the lights on since the accident in order to keep the tank warm. I got paid today and bought a new heater.
Tonight I will let the lights go off and see what happens tomorrow. I fed with DT's twice today to get some food in there just in case.

We'll see. Only bad things happen fast!
Good things take a while ...

Thnx
Joe
 

Dewman

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Ok, so the green montipora is starting to look better. Some of it's polyps have begun to extend, but they are all bleached out and so It's hard to tell if they are going tobe green again. Some of the smaller frags have lost the growth tissue at the end of their arms and it's sloughing off.
The giant orange digitata, is still showing no sign of polyp extention. I wish I knew what to do. At least he's not rotting away like the green ones.


Everythng else in the tank is looking great, even the clam survived with no problems. I did, however, have one of my Hawaiian fan worms lose it's crown of feathers. He did this when I had a temp spike during the summer, then he grew them all back. I will wait and see if he is going to recover.
 

jimbo327

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Dewman,

If you are to get a new heater, you should get one of those new titanium heaters. They do not break and leak into your water. Just a suggestion.

You got real lucky ot have everything survive after that "little" incident, but unforseen accidents has happened to me before also. I woke up in the morning and found my tank had flooded because the pump went out and siphoned back to my sump. And my sump couldn't hold the extra water. Since, I've corrected the problem. But boy o boy, when I woke up that morning...I was busier than a one legged mexican in an azz-kicking contest. :D

Jimmy
 

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