Had power outage. corals dying, fish dead!

[Subtropic Reefer]

I woke up to my stuff off after a power outage. After some time (4 or 5 hours,) it was back on. All my equipment is fine and running now, however corals do not look good at all! all closed up and some even bleaching! My lips are even losing tissue! what do i do? The water is a brownish color. have red planaria and some appears to have died. could this have caused bad water color? Are the toxins killing corals? I did a 40 % water change. Also my clown fish was spinning around in the current and later died.

 

[Llyod276]

Consider running carbon. Unless you have toxic fish/inverts it would prolly not be that. Also how old is that tank. If it's brand new/cycling then this kinda crash is to be expected. I routinely forget to turn my pumps back on for 12hrs at a time, like 2x month at least and nothing has died, sure the temp dropped 4-5° but that's it.

Odd that it should kill everything that fast, but then again if it's a nano then I get it. Mines a 75g with a sump in the basement. So yeah odd that this happened. Maybe if something did die, then you have a combination ammonia spike and bacterial bloom.

Start testing your water parameters and see what's high, till then keep changing water.

Seems like most advice is to turn down/reduce intensity of lights when corals are damaged/hurt.

 

[Kiwi reefer]

Defeitnly test the water

I would expect by how i read what you wrote youre gonna be doing another water change

 

[jcdeng]

always have battery powered airpumps on hand, and with fresh batteries. The died off is probably due to oxygen starvation. 4-5 hours should not have affected the temperature of the tank too much, maybe 2-3 degrees lower but that shouldn't cause a mass die off, especially corals. Corals can tolerate a bit cooler temps.

 

[brandon429]

@Subtropic Reefer

this thread here now was made after this one:

EMERGENCY - Everything is dying!!! i had power outage. Help!

I had a power outage last night while i was asleep and woke up to all my corals closed up and my fish almost dead. to make things worse, the water went from clear to almost brown. I’m about to test right now. what else should I do? acros went from healthy to bleached! i’m so worried.

www.reef2reef.com

was there missing info there/ anything need clarifying

asking because if you’re still running lights, or delaying the cleaning shown, it’s literally killing more animals than would be killed if advice was followed hours ago, wanting to make sure delay doesn’t extend the losses. The deep cleaning required takes about two hours, don’t delay it over nite

run the cpr shown to you before you go to bed dont leave the chemical soup in place ten more hours

 

[MinnieMouse2]

I second the battery pump air pumps. They run on two D batteries. They last around 4 hours before the batteries run out. They have new ones that sense an outage and automatically come on. I also have a rainbird thermostat on tank that sounds an alarm. This alarm you would have to be in the room to hear it. Power is no longer a guarantee in this nation or a quick fix. Backup generators are good to have. Their limitations are fuel not easy to store, fuel could run short in the emergency. You have to start the generator often to keep it working. We found out in Texas those who had not kept their generators clean and running every so often, when our Polar Vortex came through, their reef tanks all over Texas died because the generators would not start or fuel got to be hard to find. Fuel in the generators do not last days, more like so many hours before you need a refill. My family member also is the type that says we hardly ever lose our power who needs to buy an expensive generator. We keep a hunting Aladdin kerosene heater around to boil water should I have to keep the tanks warm. If you have a way to keep tanks warm and air in the tank , a tank would make it. If the emergency lasts for days like it did in Texas, chances go down.