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Keeping Fish Alive During Power Outage


mjoconr

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So I'm currently looking at not having power for possibility the next day or so. Power went out about 3:00pm, at 6pm the temperature in all the tanks had dropped by about 2 degrees C.

I went out at about 5pm and pickup up dinner and 20L tank of fuel and I now have power cables running in from outside the back patio to most ends of the house.

I added power slowly so as not to overload the generator and all the tanks are now slowly coming back to the correct temperature.

Going to be interesting to see if I can keep the generator running :)

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I wouldn't worry about the temp of your tanks this time of the year. I've had mine turned off for the past several weeks.

if you have power I'd just pop the filter on, no worries :p

Hope the OP missed typed "2 Deg C." on your recommendations lol

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My area is getting down to 11 degrees C tonite and 7 degrees C tomorrow :)

I have the generator going and that will keep things going.

The url Staplez provided was very interesting

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We lost power for about 3 days, about 5 years back in Perth when we had a big hail storm. I had a cheap generated which struggled keeping the absolute basics going for the first 12 hours. I then went out and purchased a ~$900 generator (2kW).

Never looked back, when it comes to fish keeping best 900bucks i ever spent.

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You could have your tank set at 26-27 degrees and you could drop 6 or 7 degrees (or more) and still have no issues.

I've had tanks go through an entire winter with a broken heater (just house ambient heat) that had a light stuck on but had blown with no losses though they were swimming around slowly :p

I also had a twister tear up my area about 10 years ago. Tore up the power poles up the streeet and area. Was almost 4 days in the middle of winter with no power. Had a small generator with just the filtation going and never had an issue there either. No white spot or any obvious stress.

I guess people have different experiences. Clearly if you have a decent generator then you have no problems.

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I had major issues 5 years back with those halestorms also.

First day power out 16 hrs

Second day 18 hrs.

Just left the whole lot, only effected fish were 5 x colonies of tropheus.

Rest pulled through.

Got a auto switch on 14 kw jobby weeks after.

Power goes out and it auto comes on, runs absolute everything like power isn't off.

Keep watching television and bussiness as usual,,,, pretty damn good for 6k.

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I build a system like that for my old place at Kersbrook (Adelaide Hills), the pumps where all electric so in a bush fire nothing would work.

It was interesting because I had to design the circuit and have a electrical engineer approve them because I could not find a contractor who had any knowledge of the correct methods. Took me a lot of research as I'm a compsci grad.

Cost a lot more than 6K, just the generator was just under 12K. Have not build one at this home as its in a more built up area.

I'm starting to think I should though as the power is very unrelaible.

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I build a system like that for my old place at Kersbrook (Adelaide Hills), the pumps where all electric so in a bush fire nothing would work.It was interesting because I had to design the circuit and have a electrical engineer approve them because I could not find a contractor who had any knowledge of the correct methods. Took me a lot of research as I'm a compsci grad.Cost a lot more than 6K, just the generator was just under 12K. Have not build one at this home as its in a more built up area.I'm starting to think I should though as the power is very unrelaible.

Yeah, other equivelant sizes and Setups are around the 12k mark.

But it was a old guy (arrow electrics), that did 1960's rates for install lol. (Colin).

But the model I have is a well made Italian model, but it doesn't have all the silencing tech on it that most large Diesels have.

It's very loud, and when I say this, your ear drums literally rattle in your head standing near.

I live in semi rural. 4-6 acre lots,,,, but my neighbors and everyone in the estate say they feel the ground rumble and hear it for miles lol,

I put a car silencer on it (hotdog),,,, dampened noise by 15% or so.

All my fish goods add up to 11kw,,,, if all the air con's and pool heat pumps are on and running.

This thing cranks the lot,,, and the household gaff. It's a beast.

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yeah thats what I thought...with all the green stuff happening these days I wasn't' sure it was something more technical lol

For me one day in relative cold wont hurt your fish. I mean consider shipping fish. People buy fish from germany (at least a 1-2 day travel) or even a shipment to perth from the east coast. People will go to the airport the night before, the fish sit at the airport all night, then after any delays etc they get loaded into the freight area of an aircraft and go through a 6 hour (sub zero) flight to perth, airport delays, customs etc and I've never heard of anyone losing fish in freight other than putting in too much water in the bags and not having enough oxygen. Basically they can easily go through the rigors of freight and cold for 24 hours.

Its great people molly coddle the fish..I'm sure the fish appreciate it but they can also handle moderate extremes.

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Sounds like a full isolation system with auto switch. The interesting thing about these system is that every power system using mains power in Australia has a wiring system called the multiple earthed neutral (MEN) which is created by joining all the neutral together which is then connected to ground. Any change over system must handle the disconnection of this from the mains and the creation of a new MEM or power can feed back to the grid.
The change over system is only a small part of the re-wire that is needed to make something work like this on a whole house.

This is the product I used is called a High Speed Automatic AC Transfer Switch, price for this was not bad only a few hundred but the rewrite cost me about 2K and I've all ready mentioned the gen set cost. The biggest issue was that each unit could only handle 40Amp so I need two each with there own newly create MEM.

From the sound of it I paid way more than I should have for the generator, making my over all cost a lot higher than it should have been.

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I did have some minor issues to begin with after install.

I got a phone all from my solar power supplier saying quickly rush home and switch of the geny main switch.

Problem was, I had a 5kw solar system installed afterwards that fed into the grid when not in use (which is never anyway because of fish bussiness).

If power went out and geny come on, then the solar power from panels would keep feeding into house also,,,," overload boom "

So a specialized iscolation switch has to be installed that disconnected the solar power in the case of a blackout.

My geny mob and solar mob hadn't Come across this before, so was bit of a nightmare,,, but the geny mob took control and sorted it.

Our power supply also always use to be so bloody unreliable, almost power outages weekly at times.

I learnt about fish tolerance from all this,,,,, give the fish more credit for survival,,, tangs a little more sensitive.

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I agree with your last comment...fish will mostly survive anything that isn't an extreme adjustment...tanks cooling down over time they can largely deal with but if you drop a fish from 28 degrees to 18 degrees you may have some issues. Drop a tang into a low hardness/low ph tank same problem or an american into a hard tank/ high ph etc.

I gotta say that I dont baby my fish anything like I used to. I avoid the extreme issues, thats asking for problems, I set up environments to suit and stay within range but gradual adjustment can be ok imo especially in a short term environment/emergency. Some of my fish have been through their ups and downs but mostly they have come through without issues.

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I went through cyclone Yasi and did not lose power, in fact I had a colleague stay with me because his rental was an old fibro house, this colleague was arguing on Facebook with some guy in Perth about the storm, hahaha, not really funny in the grand scheme of things as people lost a lot during that storm, but hey I can look back and laugh now.

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Sounds like a full isolation system with auto switch. The interesting thing about these system is that every power system using mains power in Australia has a wiring system called the multiple earthed neutral (MEN) which is created by joining all the neutral together which is then connected to ground. Any change over system must handle the disconnection of this from the mains and the creation of a new MEM or power can feed back to the grid.

The change over system is only a small part of the re-wire that is needed to make something work like this on a whole house.

This is the product I used is called a High Speed Automatic AC Transfer Switch, price for this was not bad only a few hundred but the rewrite cost me about 2K and I've all ready mentioned the gen set cost. The biggest issue was that each unit could only handle 40Amp so I need two each with there own newly create MEM.

From the sound of it I paid way more than I should have for the generator, making my over all cost a lot higher than it should have been.

If you have a power cord with a brown wire and a blue wire, how do you determine which wire is the dangerous wire and which wire is the safer wire, granted a neutral can still kill you?

Well, let me tell you, it is better to be in water than in poo!

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Non, unless the other end is disconnected ;)

So the power just came back online, as we are not actually in the fire-ground I did think it was interesting that our power was even out but I suppose they just need to disconnect everything and look at what they can reconnect once they have some time.

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