Vacation/Phantom GFI Trip/Total Reef Wipeout (long)

RonSF · #1 07/30/2006, 03:16 AM

I took my 72 gallon reef tank to the dump today. The tank and all of it's contents. The tank had a melted center brace from an unfortunate lighting experiment a while back. The stand was a lousy All Glass stand that was water damaged. The rest was dead.

I'm slowly adjusting to the absolute silence in my living room and the stain in the parquet floor where my tank used to be. Amazingly, a simple electrical malfunction was the only difference between the healthy reef I left a week ago last Thursday and the total loss I came home this last Thursday night.

I must admit that there is a certain cathartic effect to my writing this story here on RC and sharing my grief, but I'd like to put my circumstances out in the public forum here in the hope that something in my story might help someone else avoid similar misfortune down the road.

I left my aquarium in the hands of my brother, who agreed to house sit for a week while I vacationed with the family in Kona on the Big Island. I left him with several pages of notes and a joke that I hoped most of the notes would be irrelevant because the tank would have a week of smooth sailing. Nothing of consequence had happened in many many months and I had fairly little anxiety about leaving him in charge, in spite his lack of familiarity with my tank.

RonSF · #2 07/30/2006, 03:17 AM

What happened three days later, though, was my tank's perfect storm. Record high heat was the root cause, of course. I live in San Rafael and it was over 100 degrees for days on end. On his third day, my brother went to a movie to escape the heat. When he returned a few hours later, the tank was so cloudy he couldn't see thorough it. Everything was running properly, except the chiller wasn't running and there was no temperature readout. I had told him to turn the lights out if the temperature got too high, so he did that, but did nothing else for at least two hours until he reached by cell phone on the beach in Hawaii, where I had been snorkeling with the kids, admiring the local fish.

I had him use my handheld digital thermometer in the tank and it showed the temperature at 96 degrees. Only later, when we talked at greater length, I found out that it read this high with the cap on! The cap is not water tight, but it was most likely even warmer. Obviously, I had him take emergency measures immediately, but the damage was already done.

I had him add bags of ice to the sump and tank and we looked for the cause of the chiller turning off. My first suspicion was the new, in wall GFI that was installed three months ago and my hunch was correct. As soon as I had him punch the reset button it started up. I talked him thorough two large water changes, lots of carbon, a poly filter over the next 24 hours, but fish and coral were cooked already.

To make matters worse, he apparently decided that I should be shielded from the awful truth and only told me about two of my fish dying and "30%" of my coral. For the next four days of my vacation he told me that things were looking better, but I returned home to find everything dead. Out of a tankful teeming with life, only a few bristleworms and a hermit my kids have named "Lucky" survived. For me, this was much harder than hearing that all was lost from the beginning.

RonSF · #3 07/30/2006, 03:18 AM

I have a gas powered generator for emergency power outages, but never counted on my pumps and lights working on a sweltering day and then my chiller going out. I had a titanium ground probe in the sump and new, professionally installed wiring with GFIs that were put in in anticipation of my new tank. Temperature alarms would have helped, if course, if anyone was home. I suspect that the chiller may have been off for longer than the few hours that he was gone, but this particular malfunction was not on my radar screen. A system that calls a cell phone would be helpful, but is most likely beyond my means or DIY wherewithall.

I thought that phantom trips of GFIs were mainly an issue with inexpensive plug in models, but obviously something malfunctioned. Are there any options aside from electrocution or unreliability when it comes to tank electrical safety?

RonSF · #4 07/30/2006, 03:27 AM

I've had a new tank, 90% of my new equipment, and an almost completed custom stand I'm working on standing by for over a year now. The new LeeMar 170 was slated to be a four sided room divider behind my couch in exactly the same spot that the old tank was in. My upgrade was mainly delayed because I wanted to replace my water damaged wood parquet flooring with tile in my living room and it was a big project. To be honest, the changeover has been something that I've been apprehensive about. The upside now, if you can call it that, is that if I do follow though with the new tank it will be a much saner and easier project to do the floors and install the new tank.

I'm still on the fence with my thoughts about where to go from here. I really need a little time to sort things out. With luck, I will get my enthusiasm back and rejoin the hobby. Ironically, I first got out of salt water fish keeping when an airline came loose from my undergravel filter during a vacation in the late 70's. After getting into reefing four years ago with renewed enthusiasm, I had an inverse disaster occur a couple of years ago. My defective Reefkeeper controller malfunctioned and the tank dropped to 56 degrees. That time, I managed to save most of my fish and coral though. It was disheartening, but I bounced back. This time, however, everything is different. Four years of nurturing beautiful things have been reduced to memories. I crushed my coral skeletons in my bare hands to take up less room in the load I took to the dump.

Probably the most productive part of my time away from reefkeeping, though, will be my daydreaming about better systems and components. I know I can't handle another financial and emotional loss of this magnitude and that I feel responsible for the deaths of anything in my charge. The old cliche is right: Bad things happen fast in this hobby.

My diving for the first time in ages, and getting to introduce my 10 year old son to diving himself this last week, though, only reinforced my love for the ocean and the joy I get in sharing it's secrets with others. Time will tell what lies ahead for me. . .

Please take a few moments to think about what might go wrong in your own reef and try to visualize as many scenarios as you can. Your fish and invertebrates will thank you for it every single day. Many thanks to those of you who made it through my ramblings and best of luck to you and your tanks.

sid700 · #5 07/30/2006, 09:35 AM

Hi Ron. I'm really sorry about your loss. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experience.

marw99 · #6 07/30/2006, 10:07 AM

Ron

Sorry to hear about your loss

orientalexpress · #7 07/30/2006, 10:23 AM

Sorry hear that,it's alway seem to happen when u on vacation.i don't know why.Reefer god must hate us for taking vacation or Maybe he's wanted us to upgrade

.Gl bud

lapsan

Mr. Ugly · #8 07/30/2006, 10:56 AM

Ugh... that is horrible. Can't imagine who feels worse, you or your brother.

Thanks for sharing the experience with everyone. Hopefully others will benefit.

Let us know when you're set up with the new tank. I'll bring a bunch of stuff to a meeting for you.

hawaiianwargod · #9 07/30/2006, 01:31 PM

Ron,

Sorry to hear your losses. Take your time to recover and maybe one day you will have an "itch" to get back.

Ti · #10 07/30/2006, 02:26 PM

sorry to hear your loss

raddogz · #11 07/30/2006, 02:40 PM

Wow, what a story. I am sorry for this loss, and as you mentioned there is one upshot to this and that is the larger tank.

As others have suggested, take the time to piece together your now ideal tank upgrade.

Good Luck!

otterpop510 · #12 07/30/2006, 03:02 PM

damn.. sorry to hear about your loss. i'm sure its emotionally heartwrenching to see something you've worked so hard on dissappear suddenly, regardless of the cost to replace. take a little breather, your new tank and equipment will be there, and hopefully you'll come back even stronger than ever..

techrach · #13 07/30/2006, 03:29 PM

sorry for the loss. I can'y imagine what I would do. I am still new it the hobbies. sorry man.

RonSF · #14 07/30/2006, 08:33 PM

Thanks for the kind words, everybody. Yes, it has been especially challenging emotionally, but time is on my side.

I'm still looking for more feeback and information on GFIs, too. If I carried a hand gun, I might have a couple of holes in the wall right now where they once were. I might feel a little better afterwards, but then I'd have one more thing to fix up afterwards.

sfsuphysics · #15 07/30/2006, 09:15 PM

Yeah, as safe as those things are I don't think I trust putting any sort of critical equipment on an outlet with a GFCI. For the love of me my magnetic metal halide ballast would occasionally trip whenever it turned off, and other than some theories of a delayed current movement in the transformer I really didn't have any issues, so I plugged that into a non-GFCI plug. Safe? probably not, but then again not everything reef related is prefectly safe.

crazzyreefer · #16 07/30/2006, 10:21 PM

Ron, I feel your pain, I was dumb enough to disconnect my fans and clean them just prior to fathers day, when I got back several days latter, my tank was at 125 degrees, I lost a couple of fish and almost all my corals also, I did no water changes and let the temps come down on their own, I took this hands off approch for several reasons, ... I was ****ed off at myself, I have a hands off system, ...with no filters, there isnt much that you can do after a disaster... several of my fish did make it and are doing great, and even some of the dead bleached corals have new life,... take some time off... fix your floors, and when your ready I believe most of us will donate a few frags to get you started again.

Nicholas

andyman · #17 07/30/2006, 10:25 PM

With all the stories I've been hearing lately, a simply monitorig solution that is on battery backup could have averted most tank losses. Nuff said.

andy

RonSF · #18 07/30/2006, 11:09 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by andyman
With all the stories I've been hearing lately, a simply monitorig solution that is on battery backup could have averted most tank losses. Nuff said.

andy

What sort of backup battery would you propose to run my 1/3hp chiller for hours? If it happened while my brother was in a movie theatre, as the story goes, what would the smart reefer's system do that mine didn't? I'm sure you didn't mean your comment to come across with an impiled "you moron" at the end, did you Andy? (I just took it that way)

P.S. My next door neighbor just told me that her back yard thermometer, in the shade, read 111 that day, 3 degrees warmer than downtown San Rafael over the hill.

pepe.king.prawn · #19 07/31/2006, 12:16 AM

I don't know if he's proposing that you run your chiller off of a battery, but rather to run some sort of monitor for your tank that has a back up battery should the power fail. I believe that some of the "controllers" these days have the ability to be connected to your computer so that they can e-mail you, or page you or something like that. Accidents happen, and it sounds like you had measures in place to avert disaster as best possible and in the future won't be using GFI. I don't use GFI except next where the law says I have to, and I don't use a grounding probe. Do I feel unsafe around my tank? Not at all. It's better to take measures to prevent electrical contacting water rather than assume a GFI socket will save your rear end (not being accusatory, I've just seen an immense amount of faith put in GFI's in the clubs).

I'm sorry to hear about your losses. I've been extremely negligent of my tank (I don't live in the same city as my tank currently), and I was told the water got up to 90. I've lost probably half of my SPS, but I have no choices. I guess I'm lucky I haven't lost it all. It's not worth giving yourself high blood pressure over. Give it another shot when you're ready.

sid700 · #20 07/31/2006, 10:08 AM

My return pump was connected to my UPS which in turn was connected to a GFI. Returning after a three day vacation the return pump was not working. The UPS has discharge. The GFI had tripped and did not un-tripped (don't know if this is a word). There had been a power outage.

I don't know how long the return pump was out, but all the inhabitants of my tank lived. Temp was low (72 I think) because my heater was in the sump, and the close loop was running.

Now, my return pump is connected to a UPS and the UPS is not connected to a GFI.

I am still using the GFI that tripped. My lights (MH+PCs), closed looped pump, powerheads and most everything are connected to it. I've had many power outages. But the GFI has not tripped again.

I don't know what happened. I've since tripped the breakers to the tank. Quick on-off and also turned it off for an hour, just to test the system. Things seem to work. After reading about your experience, I'm thinking of doing this test periodically, or at least a few days before I leave for vacation.

Maybe GFIs can trip during an outage (or during power up) depending on what's connected to it?

andyman · #21 07/31/2006, 01:04 PM

Hey ron, not implying you moron or anything like that. I've just heard so many stories lately of peoples tank failing and with all the $$ spent on this hobby, that a monitoring solution would have saved most of the tanks (with the exception of maybe a leaking tank or something.) The battery backup would be on the monitoring system and nothing else in case power goes out and you need to be notified. I'm also assuming the battery backup is powering the DSL modem and router and switches.

I know Nicholas has a monitoring system, but his tank crashed cuz he didn't hook it up! Anyway sorry about your loss. Don't mean to sound harsh on people, but everytime I mention things about monitoring their tanks, I get brushed off. Monitoring your tank in my opinion isn't luxury, its a requirement. Especially when you have a 24x7 requirement to keep things running smoothly.

Perhaps the club should have a meeting or DIY session on how to do this. I believe there was a cheap solution to do this with a Linksys router.

andy

sfsuphysics · #22 07/31/2006, 01:18 PM

We had a meeting on how to do this in general terms Andy, I got really inspired by the level of your techno-savy unfortunately I'm not an engineer so most of it went well beyond me. A DIY session where we actually build one would be great! Even if its not club sponsored it'd be nice to see some directions someplace and maybe someone who understands those can translate those to English

There were a number of different probes you could hook up with that wasn't there? I mean pH, temp, salinity(??), orp?.

landragon · #23 07/31/2006, 02:31 PM

My gfci will trip out of the blue once evbery three months or so. In wall, proffessiionally installed. Always when I'm home SO FAR. Knocking on wood.

RonSF · #24 07/31/2006, 10:14 PM

I'd like to apologize to Andy for taking offence at what I perceived as brusquenesss. It was my own sensitivity after this big event for me and nothing more. I'm obviously still kicking myself for setting up the house of cards that fell, so it was most likely a lame defense mechanism on my part to criticise him.

Thanks for the suggestions everybody. My next tank will most definately have a way of crying out for help if it gets out of whack. The cost of ready made controllers with this capability has been out of reach for me in the past. The price is slowly coming down, though, and I will make sure that I don't spend money on livestock again before I spend enough for a more failsafe system. I'm a pixel pusher, not a coding or board soldering type, so I have yet to see a DIY solution that will be within my grasp.

Even with a good monitor, though, it can only be more failsafe, not entirely failsafe. In reflecting on the day things crashed, the margin of error is so razor thin on a day when it is 111 outside and the tank is in a non air conditioned Eichler with a flat tar roof and no insulation. Unfortunately, until the chiller went out, the tank was better looked after than the people in my household. House rich and cash poor . . .

crazzyreefer · #25 07/31/2006, 10:37 PM

so ill take offence....lol...