Gcichlid Posted January 13, 2004 Share Posted January 13, 2004 Hi Our local council is going to switch off all power between 6pm and 6am for a couple of days running at end of this month to run power cables underground. This affects my commercial premises in which I have 5 tanks of American cichlids (6x2 ft and 4x2 ft tanks). Luckily its during hot weather so I guess heatings not a problem (I have all my heaters off now anyway) but I'd appreciate advise as to keeping the tanks going without losing fish apart from that. I have plenty of battery operated pumps which I can run in the tanks as well as in the cannister filters(to keep the bacteria aerated) but will the actual loss of filtration for up to 12 hours at a time be a disaster? Most of the fish are medium to large in size (ie oscars, jags,cuban,etc) although I have two tanks of juvies. I've looked at putting a compressor in for those blackout periods but they only run for abt 4 hours anyway and my insurers not too keen about running a fuel driven compressor at night unattended! Any advice will be gratefully recieved. I'm in Five Dock so no real temperature extremes. Cheers Nick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
catalyst Posted January 13, 2004 Share Posted January 13, 2004 It might be a good Idea to hire a petrol Generator for a couple days, Although if you are a shop I would suggest you invest in one for the future. Have a look on ebay there are some great prices there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gcichlid Posted January 13, 2004 Author Share Posted January 13, 2004 Thanks catylst. Its not a shop, its a suite of offices on the top story of a building and my insurers wont allow a petrol generator to be operated unattended at night because its a high density commercial area. Its a pain in the butt - its the first blackout we've ever had in 15 years! I may have to risk it just using a couple of battery pumps in each tank to get some oxygen/water movement going. I know that I'm going to lose a good percentage of bacteria but it may be OK. The smaller fish I'll take home. At least in this occasion we'll have plenty of warning about the power going out - not just a sudden blackout. Cheers Nick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Serial-Cichlid Posted January 13, 2004 Share Posted January 13, 2004 Check out this post: Blackouts Post HTH Cheers Paul Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
catalyst Posted January 14, 2004 Share Posted January 14, 2004 You could use your battery air pumps and then use a 12v boat bildge pump to circulate the water. to keep the bacteria alive I agree that a air stone in the filter would work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted January 14, 2004 Share Posted January 14, 2004 I'd opt the 12v way, you can buy the boat pumps from bias boating pretty cheap. And a few airstones should be ok. EDIT: Here is their page on pumps. http://www.biasboating.com.au/pumps_bilge.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Posted January 14, 2004 Share Posted January 14, 2004 G'day Nick I reckon by keeping the bacteria in the cannisters happy overnight and "battery powered" air in the tanks as well, the fish will probably be just fine. However if you want to make sure then .... If money is not that much of a problem then you may want to consider some deep cycle batteries connected to an inverter. Forget the lights and heaters as already stated. Add up your other power usage on the tanks. Work out how many watts you need. Then head to Jaycar and purchase an inverter I would add about 100 watts to be safe. You could also look at Supacheap auto as they have some very cheap inverters. Get your calculator out and working on about 85% efficiency, work out how much battery power you need/how long it will last. Purchase/borrow/reallocate the deep cycle batteries. 90 - 100 amp/hrs. (I bought mine at Kmart of all places ) You may even get away with using normal car batteries (perhaps someone else can assist here?) Get a battery charger or two. That way the battery (s) can be recharged throughout the day. I suppose it all depends on whether a backup power system may be useful to you in the future, for me it is, but your requirements may be different. Any more assistance please let me/us know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter_Gun_Riff Posted January 14, 2004 Share Posted January 14, 2004 couldnt you put the air stone and hose down the outlet hose in your canister filter to act like a sponge filter? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chorrylan Posted January 14, 2004 Share Posted January 14, 2004 hi, I'd do three things 1. stock up on lots of batteries or a bigger battery/inverter setup but just for the airpumps you mentioned. 2. if you're running bare tanks add some substrate now so the bacteria get until the end of the month to colonize it. 3. if you have any with particularly high population densities reduce them a bit. As I presume they're display tanks I expect this is not the case though. I've had several occasions when the filtration to a tank has been turned off for a period of time. Once I accidently left a canister turned off for about 4 days; on other occasions when doing a water change I've noticed that the top tank on my rack wasn't actually getting any water in. Usually a snail or something has got lodged somewhere and reduced the flow so it has all gone to the lower tanks and none has lifted to the top one, possibly and probably for days. The tanks involved all have a fair amount of substrate and a fair bit of water flow from airstones so I think the nitrogen cycle was chugging away quite happily even without the filter. In all of the cases I've found out during a water change and have simply turned the filters back on and continued with the water change (even the canister case... it blew out lots of crap when restarted so I ended up doing a 50% water change to clean up the tank but that was it). In the case of the rack-top tanks the tanks get quite a bit grottier while this was going on as junk was not going over the overflow but I've never noticed the fish having any concerns... in fact the bristlenose and leleupi have spawned each time, while the filtration has been off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bijengum Posted January 14, 2004 Share Posted January 14, 2004 G'dsy Laurie. I didn't think they would allow blackouts in the ACT. There must be a law against it. Those peppermints I got from you are growing like crazy. Back on the topic, the generators are getting so cheap now it is feasible to have one just for the fish. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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