Well, disaster struck my beautiful tank last week. My Apex **** the bed on super bowl sunday. It took 2 days but I finally got a hold of Neptune support and they determined I needed a replacement. They sent it out and it was due to be delivered by this past Tuesday. Well, at some point thursday night one of my Ranco temp controllers went rogue and boiled the entire tank. I woke up to a cloudy 99 degree mess. All fish dead but 2. My maroon clown and my pajama cardinal (oldest fish I own) somehow survived the ordeal. I would say just about all my beautiful corals are gone. Some of the softies may rebound, but I'm looking at many many white skeletons. Anything that even has a small sign of tissue I'm keeping to attempt a resurrection. My only luck here was I had a handful of frags, 8 fish and a pistol shrimp in my observation tank, so I can immediately begin my rebuild. I was able to catch the clown and cardinal and I moved them to observation with the other 8 and they are just fine.
Maybe the worst part of this whole thing is the Apex replacement ACTUALLY CAME EARLY. It was delivered on Friday so I was literally a half day or so away from avoiding this whole thing.
I was able to pinpoint this to a single point of failure. One of my ranco temp controllers was bugging out. It was in cooling mode rather than heating mode. I think the tank survived this long because the apex would turn off it's outlet before it could go rogue. So losing the apex definitely set things up for disaster. I think the reason I also made it from Sunday-Friday without issue was it was not very warm in NY... until Thursday. It was like 65 degrees out and my house was warmer than usual. Once the temp of the tank crossed the set temp of the Ranco of 79 degrees that cooling mode kicked in and ran my 800w finnex heater constantly thinking it was running something that would cool while all it did was cook the tank. That controller has been removed as it seems to be erroring out when I try to flip it to heat mode. It only wants to run on cooling so it's outta there.
After cleanup, water changes, carbon, gfo, etc, I got things back to being stable. I assessed all my damage and I removed a bunch of rock, rearranged/cleaned up what was left. I actually love the new aquascape I have created. I moved over the fish and put back the corals I'm going to try to rehab. This weekend I'll work on placement of the new coral which is still in observation. It just insane how my colorful and full of life tank is now this sterile almost colorless scape.
Last night I moved the fish and I was later just sitting and watching tv when my Apex again **** the bed. I've already reached out to support, but I am putting some extra safeguards in place so that I can continue to monitor and catch anything before I lose these fish as well.
Anyhow, thanks for listening to my venting and here are some before and after pix of the entire ordeal.
